


Monsters

by Whuffie



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Werewolf, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 11:50:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1549535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whuffie/pseuds/Whuffie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Audrie was enjoying a relatively quiet life as Commander of the Grey; she filled the days with the duties of the Arling.  Eight years passed after the death of the Mother, and with the exception of Anders’ mysterious disappearance, things were peaceful. She thought she’d start a lazy day with Alistair, a fellow Warden and lover.  When a flying dwarf canon balled into the middle of the bed trumpeting news about werewolves and templars, Audrie knew there was trouble.  It only got worse when Sigrun told her Cullen was the templar waiting outside.  They were put on the trail of something big enough to kidnap grown werewolves and creating creatures by fusing different species together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Canon friendly Dragon Age AU setting. Based on Origins, DA2, and short story by Helper with a few minor changes. Did not include lore from comics or novels. Written before the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition so it will not follow anything in that game.
> 
> Warnings: Contains horror / Frankenstein monster type descriptions of monsters and consensual sexual content.
> 
> Special thanks to LadyAmesIndy and Mirelie for being my Betas.
> 
> As always, if you (the reader) spot rough grammar, bad formatting, or other glaring mistakes please leave a comment. That's always greatly appreciated.
> 
> A Dragon Age Big Bang story. [Accompanying artwork.](http://whuffie.deviantart.com/art/Prepare-for-Battle-451167973)

Alistair’s hands began to wander, caressing rambling circles through the thin shift she slept in, and inching his way to the hem.  Leaning into her hair, he rustled pale strands until his lips found the place below her ear which sent chills thrilling up and down her spine.  After being together almost a decade, they’d both matured, becoming comfortable with themselves and each other.  His mouth pressed up against the leopard spot tattoos which trailed from her temple into a V pattern down her back.  Sucking in her breath, her green eyes narrowed in pleasure.  “Morning, High Constable,” she giggled into her pillow.  
  
“Good morning, Commander,” he murmured, tone dipping affectionately.         
  
Things had gotten marginally less eventful after Audrie managed to round up people to defeat the Mother.  Much to her annoyance, however, Alistair was called away to Kirkwall before the dust at the Keep had settled from the last battle.  He’d returned with the surprise of a new Warden named Carver Hawke trailing at his heels.  The Constable’s light hearted jokes hadn’t improved the mood of the green recruit, but Audrie patiently pulled Carver into the fold with the others.  The only things which worried her were that Anders had never come home and orders they’d all began to receive mysteriously from the First Warden.  When commanded by the same mysterious leader, Nathaniel briefly toured Kirkwall.  Alistair and Carver also got sent to strange places two times over the span of eight years.  The intelligence they shared with Audrie had been disturbing.  The worst rumors pointed to Anders killing a lot of people, including a Grand Cleric.    
  
What had happened to her friends?  Anders and Justice both vanished, but her fellow mage could have returned home.  The dead templar Wardens could have been hidden or explained away.  No one ever said being a Grey Warden was a safe occupation.  If they didn’t die in combat they had to answer their Calling.  As far as the outside world saw it, Wardens frequently either died or disappeared.  It likewise wouldn’t have been the first time someone vanished into a well or the depths of a forest never to be seen again.  Rolan had obvious ties to the Chantry after his Joining, and everyone knew he’d been assigned to watch “renegade mages hiding among the Wardens.”  She’d guessed that much of his intentions in under twenty four hours, but his purpose had been even more sinister.    
  
“You’re thinking too much,” Alistair teased into her ear, and began a frequent morning game of distraction.  “I can tell you’re awake,” he whispered lightly, humor threading through his words.  “You have that particular set of lines between your eyebrows you get when you’re worried.”  His hands found her breasts, cupping them, and he paused to humorously admonish, “Your face is going to freeze like that, you know.”  
  
His beard tickled her cheek, and she clenched into a fetal position, returning the playful favor by rubbing the small of her back against his hips.  From his physical response, she knew she had his complete attention.  “It's nothing important,” she assured him, rolling over on her back.  
  
He groaned in the pit of his throat, and spent a few seconds making her breathe more heavily.  Propping an arm across her, he leaned down and kissed her, making a response impossible for several long seconds as he stroked her cheek with a calloused palm.  Funny thing, but when he’d made flippant remarks about how a Blight could bring people together, he hadn’t thought it would meant falling for someone.  “Are you sure?”  He’d have been blind not to notice how pretty she was, but as the only female Grey Warden, he’d hadn’t expected to have a chance.  What would a woman ever see in him, anyway?  It had taken him awhile to understand all the things she not only saw in him, but encouraged.  If he hadn’t already, he would have fallen in love with her for that reason alone.  “If was important, we’ll just have to see what I can do to make you forget about it, won’t I?”  
  
Giggling as he tugged the hem of her shift up and began to gently nibble her neck, she twined her fingers in his long hair.  It and his beard had taken some getting used to, but she couldn’t imagine him differently any more.  It made him look older, and she enjoyed running her hands through both.  “As if anything could bother me when we’re together.”  Her words trailed off as his lips meandered downward and made her arch her back into him.  The first nights in her tent had been a comedy of errors with equal lack of experience, but they’d made up for it in the precious quiet times between catastrophes.  He wasn’t playing particularly fair, either, because one of his hands wandered while his lips were raising her body temperature.  
  
Neither of them heard the tumble of the lock to their door when it was picked, and were only half aware of the visitor bolting inside.  “Good morning!”  The patter of boots across the stone floor was the only warning before a dwarf launched herself into the middle of them.  
  
“Sigrun!” Alistair groaned in exasperation and pulled a blanket over his and Audrie’s heads.  “There’s a _reason_ we lock our door!”  
  
“I know,” she chirped, fighting to tug the quilt down far enough so she could see their eyes.  “It was locked, but I picked it.”  Ignoring the tangle of arms and legs which she couldn’t see, the dwarf sat on her knees.  “I have to keep in practice, and just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I can lapse.”  
  
“I’m going to kill her,” Alistair muttered under his breath, then he pushed back a blanket enough for his scowling brown eyes.  “I’m going to kill you,” he repeated to the interloper.  
  
“No you won’t,” she said cheerfully, sitting on top of his shins.   “I’m already dead.  Remember?”  
  
“You _are_ interrupting,” Audrie grumbled, tugging her shift down over her hips with a lot of difficulty because of a dwarf pinning down the quilt.  “We were right in the middle of something.”  
  
“‘Were’ being the important part,” Alistair added grumpily.  “Will you move?  My legs are going numb.”  Pushing himself up with his elbows, the admiring glance from Audrie on his bare chest was almost enough to make him blush.  Instead, he melted into an undignified grin which Wynne once accused him of being “doe eyed.”  He never thought he was that bad, but maybe he was?  Other people said he was.  After a while, he tried to not let the idea bother him.  
  
Shifting to sit at the foot of the bed and leaning on her hands and knees, Sigrun beamed. “There’s some people here to see you, Commander, and one of them scared off the Silver Order.   I thought you might want to go out and see him.  The other one is a templar who said he knew you.  He looked nervous,” she added, “but hasn’t run away, yet.”    
  
“It’s too early in the morning for this,” Audrie groused as she pushed her hair out of her face and succumbed to the inevitability of duty instead of a pleasant, lazy, erotic morning.  “Why, exactly, is the first thing which is scaring off half the best knights in the country?” They’d fought armored ogres and held down the Keep for Maker sake, so what could possibly make them nervous?  “Do I even want to know?”  
  
“Oh, she’s a werewolf!”  Sigrun bounced off the bottom of the bed enthusiastically. “I think it was a coincidence they got here at the same time.  I want to go and talk to him some more.  This is the first time I’ve seen a werewolf which wasn’t Blight corrupted.”    
  
“Wait,” Audrie scrambled out of bed and grabbed her armored robes, “who’s with them now?”  
  
“Carver and Nathaniel,” Sigrun piped from the doorway. “Will that be all, Commander?”  
  
Nodding wearily, Audrie let the other woman go, and looked over her shoulder at Alistair.  “A werewolf and a templar.  Now I’m almost sure I don’t want to know.”  Smiling in spite of herself as Alistair got up and wrapped his arms around her, she leaned back against his chest.  “I’m going to start putting something really heavy in front of our door before we go to sleep from now on, and hope no one learns to scale the outside wall.”  Softening, she turned her head and tipped her chin so Alistair could kiss her.  Complying happily, they reveled in a few seconds of warm safety before she sighed.  “I’ll help you with your straps if you get my laces.”  
  
She didn't have to ask.  Both of them could have managed to dress on their own, but it was part of their daily routine.  There were a few small things they refused to sacrifice.  Ironically, she was more worried about the templar than the werewolf.  Carver’s sisters and father were both mages, so he didn’t have much affection for the armored arm of the Chantry.  The hairy monster, so long as it wasn’t rampaging through the castle, would be fine with Howe.  Nathaniel was a ranger, and one of the better diplomats for dealing with a half animal werewolf mindset.  His talents were proven most prominently by the pet skunk which waddled around behind him almost everywhere he went.  It made him smile more often, so she didn’t deny him the pet.  That didn’t mean there wasn’t a lot said when Alistair accidentally stepped on it and got sprayed.  Even magic couldn’t get rid of the stench, and if Alistair ever questioned Audrie loved him, the twenty-third bath should have been proof of her commitment.    
  
“What do you suppose a templar and werewolf are here?”  Alistair arranged his undertunic and padding before laying the vivid blue uniform and scale over his head.  “On my list of things to expect this morning, neither of those were at the top.”  
  
Audrie tightened the straps after he put his griffon plates on, poking him in the ribs to get him to roll his shoulders so the fit wasn’t too tight or loose.  “You have a list?” she bantered tolerantly.  
  
“Oh yes.”  Turning her gently around, he tightened her laces, covering up the trail of spot tattoos which made him a little giddy every time he remembered that he was the only one ever allowed to see where they ended.  “It’s a long list, too,” he told her conspiratorially.  “I like to be prepared.”  The ends of her long hair always got trapped in her clothes when she dressed.  It gave him an excuse to run his hands through when he released it, and she happily tolerated him.    
  
She smiled and patted the inside of his thigh mischievously while helping him with the rest of his platemail.  “I think that will do it.  We’re both presentable.”  Although he’d been joking about preparations, she wasn’t.  Not entirely, and she slung her staff into its holder on her back.    
  
Following her lead, Alistair sheathed Maric’s sword and settled his shield into place across his shoulders.  “Expecting trouble, Love?”    
  
“A werewolf, templar, Carver, Nathaniel and Sigrun are out there.  Do you blame me?”  Audrie didn’t bother to lock the door behind her.  “Let’s go see what the uproar is about.”


	2. Chapter 2

Cullen and Carver stood less than a pace apart beneath the shadow of the portcullis.  Their faces were cast in long, jagged splashes of black against the bloody red light of the morning.  The Warden had his arms crossed tightly over his chest and glared mutinously.  The templar planted his feet wide, daring him to move.  Both faces twisted into silent, stony glares which sizzled with defiance. Occasionally, one or the other would spare a glance for the looming werewolf watching them.  They refused to break eye contact for anything else.

Bulfa, the battle scarred werewolf emissary from the Blight, looked on, unperturbed by the humans.  He’d gained flecks of silver on his muzzle since Ft. Drakon, and was much older than the pair. Confident of his place in the world, he considered it beneath his dignity to be in the middle of squabbling pups who wanted to assert dominance among their human pack.  Pausing to scratch his chest, he tried to ignore them, and asked Nathaniel in fluent common tongue if he was doing well that morning. It had been a long time since the werewolves answered the pact made with the Grey Wardens, offering teeth and claws toward the destruction of the Archdemon.  Bulfa couldn’t know how well he’d be received after so many years, and was using his most civilized behavior.  “Warden?" He addressed Nathaniel, the obvious senior and leader among the trio. "Is there a problem?”

With fingers rolling smallest to largest on the grip of his grandfather’s bow, Nathaniel shook his head, keeping his voice low.  “No,” he answered shortly, “there’s no problem.  What brings you here?”  

“Hrr.”  The wolf-beast licked his nose, and whiskers prickled as his nostrils dilated for scents to gauge Nathaniel’s mood.  Running a short thumb over the crude pouch slung across his chest, he took another step away from Cullen. “I must see Grey Warden Audrie.  I came at the behest of the Lady of the Forest.”  The benign spirit could leave the forest for a short time, but only when there was dire need.  It was a strain on her, and Swiftrunner argued that she was too precious to be risked.  Bulfa immediately volunteered to make the long journey, avoiding humans as much as possible and running by night.  It had taken him almost four months of scouting and returning home before he found the correct human habitation.  He finally persevered and went directly from the forest to the human den.  “I traveled with the Wardens during the Blight, and we fought at her order.”  Cold winter wind rustled the fur on his shoulders, and he smelled a storm in it.  “There is something I must ask her.”

All the Wardens heard the tragic story of Zathrian, the blood magic pact, curse, and how it ended in disaster. Those particular elves all either dead or prowled the forest as werewolves.  That didn’t allow Nathaniel to trust a creature with an infectious bite to go wandering around the Keep unsupervised. “Why, exactly?”  He’d fitted an arrow to the string of his bow, but kept it pointed down unless Bulfa made a threatening movement.  In a manner of speaking they were heroes of the Blight just as the dwarves and mages.

“We need her,” the werewolf answered simply, and he pricked his ears.  Sigrun came bustling out to help ease the tension between Ranger and werebeast.  She barely came up to his furry hip but fearlessly walked up and introduced herself.  Bulfa cocked his head to one side then gingerly slipped two of his massive, clawed fingers into her hand.  To his amusement, she shook it enthusiastically, and a disconcerting smile pulled back from his jutting lower teeth.  “Hello.”

Cullen spared a glance at the bizarre sight, then gave Hawke’s little brother his full attention.  Of all the people for him to encounter at the gates of the Grey Warden stronghold, this was the last he expected. Being observant by nature, the templar noticed Carver vanished suddenly from Hawke’s side after the first year Kirkwall.  Up until that point, the brother was a surly, sulky shadow to the woman who rose up to Champion status.  The sibling was abruptly absent and Hawke added the Prince of Starkhaven who Cullen knew from the Chantry.  Not familiar enough with Hawke, he’d never intruded to ask where her brother had gone.  Now it was obvious.

“Yes,” Carver picked up, ready to jump into an interrogation of the templar.  “Speaking of seeing the Commander, why do _you_  need her?  The last time I saw you, you were beating up some Templar recruit and telling my sister all about Abominations.”  The coin had helped get them to the Deep Roads, where his life had changed forever, but that didn’t leave happy memories of a sadistic Knight-Captain kneeing a boy in the stomach.  “Shouldn’t you be there instead of here, or did your techniques get too violent?”

Cullen’s front teeth locked momentarily together as he refused to acknowledge Carver’s insinuations of desertion.  He squared his shoulders beneath civilian clothes, feeling stripped of more than his rank without the heavy armor wrapped around him.  “That happened years ago, and you’ll recall,” he reminded Carver stiffly, “the situation was resolved.”

“Thanks to my sister,” Carver snapped with mixed resentment and pride.  He cast a nervous look at the complacent werewolf having a discussion with Sigrun and Nathaniel.  “That still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

“Warden Commander Amell is an old friend,” Cullen repeated a variation of what he’d told everyone when he’d first arrived.  “I came here to talk to her.”  He’d said it so many times it was beginning to drone.

“Amell?” Forgetting his belligerence for confusion at the mention of a surname, Carver scowled beneath his mop of jet hair.  He’d been living with the Wardens for years, but couldn’t remember anyone ever mentioning that particular name.  

“Yes,” Cullen retorted with rising impatience which he kept in check with strict discipline. “Commander Audrie Amell.”

Carver’s brows knit over the bridge of his nose, and he glanced toward the yawning doorway which lead into the Keep.  It couldn’t be the same Amell family, could it?  Mother was always going on about reclaiming the Amell estate, and of course his perfect sister had managed to do it.  Someone Mother mentioned on the Amell side of the family disappeared.  He knew Audrie grew up in the Tower in Ferelden, but they couldn’t be connected.  There was a lot of magic in the Hawke line, but was it possible he and his Commander were distantly related?  It didn’t make any difference, did it?  She was his Commander, and that was all.  After losing Bethany, then Mother, and possibly Marian, however, it felt more important than it would have, otherwise.

Cullen left Carver to stew over whatever was going on in his head without interruption, and wrestled with his own demons.  Hawke had freed the city from a Qunari invasion.  She’d been beside him to challenge Meredith, but the damage which had been done by one Apostate Warden had begun to cast ripples through the world.  Cullen found himself with his commanding officer dead, and half the templar order of Kirkwall ignoring commands of a Knight-Captain who relieved his superior of her post. The other half hadn’t been certain about what to do, either, because Hawke had sided against the annulment of the mages.  He supported that decision.  That didn’t help matters, but it was obvious that one rogue mage’s actions shouldn’t result in the death of innocents.  The responsible Apostate died at Hawke’s hand, which was a decision foolishly granted by Meredith.  If there was to be any peace or justice for the people who had died in the explosion, it should have been by Anders’ public trial and execution.  Without either of those things, rumors and insanity began to spread through the city like dragon fire, making the chaos worse.

Panic, escaped Circle mages, demons breaking through the Fade to run amuck and the madness of Kirkwall had been bad enough.  It was worse than reliving Kinloch Hold because that insurrection had been contained when Greagoir shut the doors.  When Hawke vanished, the entire city of Kirkwall fell into bleak madness, and it couldn’t be cornered in one building.  The Seekers began to trickle into Kirkwall with secretive, ominous agendas, hunting out anyone who had anything to do with Hawke from the barkeep at the Hanged Man to her known traveling companions.  Their questions weren’t always gentle, and Cullen wasn’t exempt from either their attention or the Chantry’s.  Everyone wanted his story told in a way which would satisfy them, and he narrowly escaped being sentenced to Aeonar at least once for telling the truth about Meredith and the damnable sword.  

Circles were breaking apart, templars were growing more and more bloodthirsty in the attempt to keep the mages under control.  Rogue templar factions were splitting off with intent of murder instead of justice, calling themselves holy while wiping the blood of innocent people from their swords.  Everything which kept Cullen stable began to crumble in front of him, so he clung to one thought.  He would go home.  Begging the Maker’s forgiveness, he stole as much lyrium as he could find, and took ship for Ferelden.

Most of his journey had been spent retching over the rail from seasickness, and he’d come directly to Vigil’s Keep, afraid to implicate his sister or family into some imagined crime by association.  Too little food, constant nausea, loss of sleep, and worry about lyrium had not left him in the most sociable of moods.  When Carver opened his mouth to say something else, Cullen was ready to meet it with stony silence.  Thankfully, that didn’t prove necessary.

Audrie emerged, blinking and a little harried in the bright morning sunlight.  Another Grey Warden flanked her, smiling amiably.  It had been too many years since his capture by Uldred and the torture inside the cage for Cullen to remember the hazy faces of his rescuers.  Only Audrie was as unforgettable as the words he’d spat at her, and although he was angrily justified at the time, he regretted them.  She was never a morning person, and old memories made him soften as Cullen found himself blurting, “You changed your hair.”

 Audrie was giving the werewolf a curious, wary look and hadn’t noticed the former templar at all.  “Hm?”  She swung around and gawked.  “Cullen?  What ... why are you here?  With a werewolf?”

“And what’s that about her hair?”  Alistair interjected with a sidelong look as he stepped closer to her, nudging her knuckles with his as he resisted the urge to take her hand.  She needed it.  That was how she cast spells, he reminded himself, and how he held a shield.  It wasn’t practical to try and hold hands on a battlefield.

“N-nothing.”  Cullen detested himself for the stammer, and hadn’t stumbled over words since he’d left the Chantry of the Green for Kirkwall.  It was something he thought left behind with the Ferelden Circle, and bit the inside of his lip.  Neither of them were the people who they’d been when that had happened, and she was no longer a young woman who he’d been assigned to watch over.  In fact, she had been the one to liberate him, in spite of the fact he never liked Greagoir’s judgement on allowing the mages their freedom when they could still be demon infested.  “I’ve come from Kirkwall,” he told her quietly.  

Carver looked like he wanted to say something about several things, but Audrie patted him gently on the shoulder with a smile.  Cullen saw a lot more confidence in her than he remembered, and an ability to lead.  He’d expected that, but seeing it was almost disconcerting.  For him, she was still a timid girl with sweet smiles who always made time to break the monotony of guarding a hallway or read together in the library.  She’d grown, changed, and saved a nation from a Blight.  Again, he reminded himself they were entirely different people.  Judging by the suspicious glare from the man who had come out with her, she was also very personally important to someone.  “Could I speak with you at your earliest convenience?”

“Alright,” Audrie answered Cullen, stifling a yawn behind her hand, “but at least tell me why you’re traveling with a werewolf?”

“I wasn’t.”  Cullen resisted the urge to put even more space between himself and the hairy threat.  “He was here when I got here this morning.”

“Oh.”  Some things hadn’t changed, and she scrunched her nose up thoughtfully in the same, specific she had ever since he’d met her.  “I’d better see what he – is that Bulfa?”  It was difficult to tell them apart, at least if one wasn’t a werewolf. “Bulfa,” Audrie decided, making a closer inspection of his markings, scars, and shape of his head.  “I’ll see what he wants first.  Carver, you can go to breakfast. Alistair, why don’t you escort Cullen inside.  Show him around, and if he’s hungry, both of you get something to eat.  Tell Cook to send out a ham bone with plenty of meat on it for our ... um... guest while you’re at it.  He might also like a nug if we have any. Eamon had the werewolves put up in the kennels, so if he stays, I’ll ask if that’s a comfortable enough place for him.”  The petrified servants had tried to make the werewolves happy in normal rooms during the Blight.  That had resulted in pillow feathers wafting out into the hallway, and rugs torn from long claws.  Human luxuries and werewolves didn’t mesh.  

Nathaniel and Sigrun remained with the Commander in case of emergency, but the werewolf was an old acquaintance.   She would have felt safe even without a command of arcane powers.

“So,” Alistair broached cheerily, “aren’t you the templar from the Tower during the Blight?”  He lead their guest into the main chamber where Varel was getting the day started and calming down members of the Silver Order who looked like they’d all seen a ghost; or a werewolf.  

“I was the last one left,” Cullen answered flatly.  “Uldred tortured and murdered all the others along with any mages who didn’t go to his side.  I was trapped in a cage of his making when Audrie came back to the Tower.”

Alistair hadn't forgotten. “I remember you.”  Audrie still had nightmares about the Tower, what happened with the Sloth demon, and the way her one time home had been desecrated.  She might not have left on the best of terms with the templars, but it had still been the one place she’d thought she’d always be safe if she was ever to go back.  Just as he’d lost most of the people he’d cared about from Loghain’s betrayal, she’d almost had it worse.  They’d stepped over her friends’ bodies or seen them mutated into abominations which attacked her.  There were only two things his love feared.  One was becoming an abomination, and the other was turned into a broodmother.  The tower had made one of her worst terrors a lot more real.  “I was with her.”

Cullen looked at him, sifting through garbled memories, and couldn’t immediately place him.  There had been a man with her, saying something about how his judgement was clouded from seeing the death of his friends and hatred.  The hair was longer and he’d grown a beard, but it was evidently the same person.  “Then you saw what Uldred did to everyone.”  He couldn’t stay in tower corridors which were haunted by memories of that torture.  Some nights he woke in a cold sweat, still able to hear the screams from the Harrowing Chamber.  Greagoir decided it was best if he was sent to another Circle, getting him away from the foul memories.

“Well,” Alistair wasn’t cruel by nature and managed a smile, “enough of that sort of talk.  What brings you to the Wardens?  I’m the High Constable, which means I’m the second in command.  You can tell me.”  He hinted heavily that Cullen _should_ disclose whatever it was to him, first.  It was protocol for he and Varel to help carry the day to day burdens and keep them from overwhelming Audrie.  Privately, he also wanted to know what a templar who had once confessed he was being tormented with Audrie being “one thing I always wanted but could never have” was doing on their doorstep.

 “I’d,” Cullen hesitated in the empty hallway which lead toward the voices and bustle of the kitchen.  Changing his thought, he gave an honest answer. “I’ve come to ask her if I can join you.”

Alistair hoisted a skeptical eyebrow and scuffed to a halt next to him.  They’d had their share of templars when Anders was still at the Keep, and none of it had gone well.  Rolan constantly harassed the mage, and obviously something went too far, finally.  Innocent people had been killed, mixed up in whatever it was which had caused the terrible incident.  None of the wardens involved had survived, so what had happened was always a mystery.  “Templars need lyrium,” he retorted flatly, “and the Grey Wardens don’t have a supply of it.  If the Chantry sent you–“

“They didn’t,” Cullen cut in sharply.  “I left the templars.  They aren’t,” his chest lifted in a weary sigh, “what they should be any more.  The Maker tells us that magic exists to serve mankind and never to rule over him.  Templars were meant to watch mages and kill abominations or maleficar.  After Kirkwall, they’re changing.”  He’d nearly been dismissed several times.  He had no doubt that eventually it would either happen or he’d be stationed somewhere useless where he wouldn’t be able to perform his duty.  All his life he’d trained to be one thing, embracing an ideal.  Now that it had failed him, he didn’t know where else to go.

“And the lyrium?”  Alistair prompted, glancing up and down the hallway for prying ears.

“It’s possible to go on without it.”  There was a former templar named Samson on the docks who had lived a pitiful shadow of life, begging for “dust.”  Cullen shuddered to imagine his life devolving into that, but he’d been strong enough to survive other, more terrible things .  If the Maker was willing, he would find a way to get through lyrium withdrawal as well.  

“It can also be fatal,” Alistair argued.  “The weepiness, hallucinations, and everything which goes with it could be worse than the lyrium itself.”  To his credit, Cullen didn’t ask how Alistair knew as much as he did.  The two of them hadn’t trained together, in spite of being of an age.  Cullen must have been a few years older or younger, and they’d missed one another as they both studied to become templars.

Cullen nodded somberly.  “I know, but if Commander Amell will have me, I want to join you.”

It was ultimately up to Audrie, but there was a little knot curled up in the corner of the Warden's mind that admitted he didn’t want Cullen in the Grey Wardens.  It was petty and selfish.  Alistair knew that, but the Cullen had a history which Alistair didn’t share with her.  He was also a templar, and a high ranking one.  Who knew what he was really up to, no matter what he said?  Audrie’s kindness and usually gentle heart worried him because he was almost sure she’d say yes.


	3. Chapter 3

“Hello, old friend.” With some exceptions, Audrie treated Bulfa exactly as any other visitor. Having spent time as a great brown bear, she knew how well an acute nose could pick up the smallest thread of fear in the overall weave of scent. Any nervousness would be obvious, and Audrie beckoned Sigrun over. Nathaniel was pulled as taut as one of his own bowstrings, and it didn’t take a hyper sense of smell to guess what he was thinking. The dwarf, on the other hand, was relaxed and brimming with curiosity. “I was told you wanted to see me?”

“I do.” The werewolf gracefully lowered himself to his haunches, putting his weight on hind paws and front knuckles as he earnestly came eye to eye with her. “The Lady and Swiftrunner have sent me to the Wardens. We need your help.” The tip of his tongue curled between his jagged teeth pensively. “Something is wrong in the forest, and something is hunting us.”

From experience, Audrie knew that while the werewolves could be very articulate, most of them were fueled by raw emotion over reason. Rage was quick to ignite, and Bulfa had been the only one she remembered who was calm enough to help them hunt, share his feasts, and have a civilized chat about the fatty content of a nug. As werewolves went, he had table manners, warning she might not want to watch him while he made a messy meal. Audrie made sure Leliana and her pet were out collecting firewood that evening, but she’d worried more about Oghren chasing down Shmooples with a fork than Bulfa.

There also weren’t many things which could tangle with a full grown werewolf. The possessed trees were capable, as was an ogre or dragon which had gotten sufficiently mature. She’d been obviously listening to Alistair too long and was making lists. Unfortunately, hers was very short. “What do you think it is, and why come here to us?”

He huffed a great sound through his powerful frame, rippling sleek fur. “We don’t know. It leaves no trace, and none of us are safe. It takes the old, young, full grown, strong and the weak. There is blood left behind sometimes, but not enough for a kill. We try to track, but it’s gone.”

“Gone?” Nathaniel interrupted, still warily prepared to put an arrow in anything which threatened the Commander or Sigrun. “Gone where?”

Bulfa gave an almost human shrug with his hunched shoulders. “We don’t know. There’s the smell of rotten earth, death, and ancient sickness the way it was when the darkspawn came.” Even the blood stank and burned their gums when teeth sank into the corrupted flesh during the battles. The survivors wondered if they would ever smell fresh air again, and wouldn’t forget it. “There wasn’t any spoor to follow, just the stink.”

Audrie grimaced and stuffed chilly fingers into her pockets. “That doesn’t sound good. Do you think there’s definitely darkspawn corruption?”

“I don’t know.” Pointed ears dropped as he rocked into a sitting position and pawed at the dirt thoughtfully, making patterns with the tip of his claw. “During the Blight, corruption was a spreading disease. This is something fleeting. We don’t see it all the time, and there’s more. We found something.” Snagging the strap of his satchel with one stunted paw-thumb, he brought it forward and flipped open the flap.

The smell coming out of it made Audrie recoil and her throat closed of its own accord. Clasping her hand over her mouth, she plugged her nostrils. Breathing shallowly through her mouth, she peered into the dark depths of the pouch. “What in the Maker’s name is that?”

Bulfa extracted a small creature which might have been a raven had the green, decomposing lizard tail not been jutting out of its hind quarters. Using a scrap of cloth out of her belt pouch so she didn’t have to actually touch the corpse, Audrie tipped the skull toward her. She grimaced anew in revulsion. The head wasn’t right, and where a beak should have curved out was a blunt, reptilian nose. Lifting a few of the feathers, she looked for stitches or some other indication it had been patched together by a demented mind. The parts fused together seamlessly, but nothing like it could have ever lived for any length of time. “This came from the forests?”

Bulfa dipped his broad muzzle, and produced a limp rat which was swollen from the onset of decomposition and had the sunken eyes of a snake. It’s feet were far too large for its body, and she guessed they came from some other species she couldn’t readily identify. A third creature had a long body like a weasel but long rabbit ears and badly matched hind legs had been somehow attached. “I’m going to put a preservation glyph over these so they don’t rot any more, is that alright?” The werewolf gave his consent and she cast it with a few motions of her hands. “Were they alive when you found them? Were they in one area or several?”

“Barely alive and didn’t stay that way for very long. We find most of them near certain ruins in the forest, but the scouts who went in to explore haven’t come back out. The place stinks of death and the taint.”

Audrie turned her back toward another gust of cold wind, envying Bulfa for his thick coat. “I don’t like anything about this. These shouldn’t have existed at all. Worse, I’ve never heard of anything able to do this, not even blood magic. A sick and twisted healer might try it, I suppose, but I can’t imagine that working, either.” She had specialized in the ability, herself, and grafting limbs back on which were hanging by a thread was possible with magic. If there was too much damage there could never be a guarantee everything would work the same way again, however. Nothing could be cobbled together the way the repugnant creations had been. They needed to find out if there was some obscure branch of magic or any history on what might have enabled someone to do it. “I hope this hasn’t anything to do with darkspawn magic, but we can’t discount that as a possibility. It’s different than human or elven.”

“We shouldn’t be seeing new forms of darkspawn. This isn’t a Blight,” Nathaniel reminded her tersely, “but it’s happened once before.”

“I remember, but you’ve had some dealings with the underground.” The slang term had taken a more literal meaning after the pragmatic archer supported her decision to ally with the Architect. Sigrun hadn’t been as optimistic, and Audrie wished she’d have listened. Instead, a battle hardened mage looked backward to a mentor she’d barely known, and tried to fill Duncan’s boots. She’d never wanted anyone to go through what she and Alistair had, and for the world to stop needing Grey Wardens. She’d believed the Architect and took his side against the Mother. The Deep Roads were more quiet than they ever had been after that, but Audrie was extremely suspicious of where the Architect was up to in recent years. He’d claimed that he needed to “borrow” Warden blood for their reverse Joining, and it worried her if he was still collecting it. “Have you heard anything out of our ‘friends?’ Something new, experiments, or an Awakened which didn’t like being cut off from the ‘singing’?” They’d never be lucky enough for the Mother to be an isolated incident.

 “No, nothing had changed since the last time.”

Giving Bulfa a friendly ruffle on top of the head, Audrie tipped her head toward the Keep. “Nathaniel, put together a team to check into that. You can have anyone you want except Alistair – he’s with me. I want you to check into this and not leave any stone unturned. The spawn have been quiet except for the occasional raid or lunatic.” Nothing like a talking darkspawn popping out of the ground trying to hug someone and carry parcels from the market to stir up townsfolk. It hadn’t been that bad, but they did have the one who was insisting on trying to help people on the surface and unintentionally spreading plague wherever he’d gone. People wanted to cuddle a hulking underground monstrosity only slightly less than a werewolf. Glancing at powerful lines and muscle coiled under layers of Bulfa’s clean fur, she had to admit that the latter weren’t so bad once you got used to them.

 She doubted the same would ever be said about the Awakened, but scratched her guest’s thick ruff, warming her fingers. “Bulfa, we’ll go to the Lady, Swiftrunner, or whoever wants to see us. If there’s any chance this is darkspawn activity, we need to go find out. Will you be comfortable in the forest overnight?”

Bulfa licked his chops, and was more interested in the aromas coming from the kitchen than worried bout where he’d sleep. Smiling indulgently, Audrie told Sigrun, “Get him a few bowls of something warm with a lot of meat to go with the ham bone, then see that he’s got a good spot where no one will bother him. I have a templar to talk to.”

Getting a wet nosed snuffle of appreciation from the beast, Audrie took the grey furred hand into her own companionably before leaving dwarf and were to setting into whatever accommodations which were fitting. There was no denying how dangerous he was, particularly without the Lady to help them tap their own intelligence beneath the rage. In their way, they were like the Awakened, but Audrie wouldn’t let herself go down that mental road. The Lady had been honest with them once they had finally been able to see her face to face. She’d lacked even Zathrian’s duplicity, but the Architect was a creature of half truths. The Lady didn’t scheme and tried a tolerable venue toward peace which didn’t involved Wardens - alive or dead.

Putting all that aside, the Warden-Commaner rubbed her eyes sleepily, wishing she could crawl back in a cozy bed with Alistair for a few hours. When she caught up to her partner and lover, she could tell he wasn’t pleased about Cullen. His tone was approachable enough from what she could catch, and he was most likely rolling out jokes. Having known him as long as she had, however, she picked up on the way his shoulders were stiffer than normal. His back was held more rigid, chin thrust out a little more than usual, and feet braced more widely apart.

Giving him a friendly nudge in the shoulder, she smiled up at him. “Thanks for taking care of our ... er... guest. Hello, Cullen,” she greeted the templar cautiously. They had been friends once, but that had been a very long time ago. The last she’d heard, Carver mentioned a Knight-Captain Cullen in the Marches. She’d assumed that meant Cullen been transferred out of their old home.

“Hello,” he responded neutrally without stammer or the warmth which would have been present in a naive boy standing duty at Kinloch Hold.

“He wants to join the Grey Wardens,” Alistair cut over him when Cullen was about to open his mouth. By the sour expression matching someone who was just told a golem wanted to go naked cliff diving with them, the Constable didn’t approve of the idea.

“Why?” Audrie blurted, staring between the two of them as if she expected Alistair to have a reasonable answer. “You’re a templar. You can’t just ... Cullen, you were always... but...!” Turning pink under her spots as Alistair gave her an odd look, the mighty hero of Ferelden stopped squeaking long enough to take a deep breath. “Okay. I’m starting over. Why do you want to be a Grey Warden, of all things?”

 “I’d like to talk to you,” refusing to give ground to Alistair’s bristling, Cullen added, “privately. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

Facing down dragons and armored ogres was one thing. Having a conference with a werewolf while one of the best archers alive stood watch was another. Deliberately putting herself alone in a room with any templar was something which still made her nervous. Cullen had been her friend, once, but the last time she’d seen him he’d been screaming about how he should have been harder on mages. They hadn’t exactly kept in touch or seen each other since then.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t killed templars before in self preservation or for Anders’ sake. If she couldn’t talk her way out of a tight corner, then she’d find a way to defend herself. “Alright,” she finally conceded, “I’ll give you an hour. Alistair, we’re going to leave at dawn. Why don’t you go upstairs and start packing our things.” She had an idea what was bothering him. Extending her hand toward him, he predictably closed the gap to hook his index finger subtly hooked around hers. The tiny signs of tension drained away, and she smiled up at him. “Make sure you get my newest robe. The other one needs stitching up.”

“Alright,” he agreed, still smiling as foolishly as the first time she’d blurted out that she thought he was handsome. “I’ll be upstairs, then. Commander.”

Audrie tossed her head in the direction of the kitchen. “Come on, Cullen, I’m starving. We’ll get something for breakfast and you can tell me why you’re here.” If Cullen was the kind of person more prone to jokes she might have suspected a giant prank. Nobody ever changed that much, so she knew he was serious. The main question which bothered her was why the sudden interest in changing to the Wardens. “There’s also something else I want to ask you about.” His expertise as a templar might give him knowledge on the creatures Bulfa had shown her which she didn’t have. If he stayed or left immediately after he answered didn’t matter. She’d learned to use her resources wisely.

Audrie loaded herself up on warm porridge, honey almond toast, and some nug they’d recently exchanged with Orzammar for feral kittens which has begun overrunning the Keep. Both sides thought they got the best of the deal. The dwarven nobles got “exotic” pets and Oghren got his nug steaks for a few weeks. Bulfa was right, they were fatty, but her tastebuds wouldn’t ever recover from Alistair’s Blight and Pea Stew (as she’d privately called it for years.) She could eat practically anything. “It’s something popular with the dwarves,” she told Cullen and plopped a taste of it next to his porridge. “Live a little.”

“You haven’t changed." The former templar almost wistfully and followed into her office. “You were always ready to experiment with something new. It made you one of the most talented mages Irving ever trained.”

“You don’t know the half of it if you think I stopped at nug nuggets. Have a seat.” She settled into a chair across from her desk and began to devour her food with a startling appetite. “I’m a busy Warden with a werewolf outside my Keep,” she reminded him after she’d gulped.

Cullen lacked her culinary adventurousness, but nibbled on the foreign meat before mixing honey into his porridge. “The last time I saw you,” he started slowly, “I said some things I shouldn’t have. You saved me and what was left of the Circle. I wasn’t in my right mind then, and thought you were another hallucination.”

She was assuming it was the part about how mages were terrifying people teetering on the edge of abusing their power or becoming abominations rather than what Alistair obviously remembered. Cullen had rambled how he’d been tempted with the one person he couldn’t ever have, and been referring to her. That was obviously what stuck with Alistair because they were new to a relationship, but it was tragically sweet of Cullen. The innocents were always the ones who suffered the most during any war, and both templar and Warden mage brutally lost the last vestiges of childhood during that year. “You were in pain, deprived of food, water, and lyrium. It’s alright, Cullen, I understood.”

 “It’s not alright,” he argued stubbornly, “and I’m sorry.” He made eye contact and held it. That was new, and they had both earned self confidence through trials the other couldn’t begin to guess. "It was unworthy of me."

“Apology accepted,” she answered softly. “Don’t worry any more about it.” The truth was, she’d nearly forgotten about him along with the ache which was faint and ever present for the others who she’d lost in different ways over the years. He’d been just another casualty to be mourned, not forgotten, but left in the shadows of the past.

“After the Blight, I was sent away to a Chantry for awhile to rest and meditate under the Maker’s gaze.” He’d never told anyone the entire story before, and it was ironically fitting that it would be her. Everything had begun to change because of her, and she was the only person he’d known almost half of his life who he could still trust.

Beginning with his trip to Kirkwall, he didn’t embellish, but also left nothing out. He explained how he had risen in the ranks, the way he’d first met Hawke, Carver, and the group who had traveled with them. While Ferelden was enjoying relative quiet and rebuilding, Kirkwall’s troubles were beginning with Qunari and mage conflicts.

Pausing to sip from a glass of water, he cleared his throat and went through the story of the Champion, and how she came to claim the title from defeating the Qunari leader. She, too, had been a mage, but by the time anyone realized it, her status protected her. He went on to describe the political insanity, including the integral pieces when Meredith’s slow descent in madness coupled with her rise to power. “I don’t know exactly what made her mad,” he admitted, “and I looked into Uldred’s eyes when he stood over me, torturing me. I saw that same look in Knight Commander Meredith at the end. I tried to stop her when she ordered the entire Circle annulled, but she was out of control. Templars were meant to protect and watch mages, not kill them all for something one man did. He was an apostate, not even part of the Circle!” His clenched fist came down with a controlled thump on the table, rattling the spoon propped in his empty dish.

“Anders,” Audrie repeated the name with a sick rock in her belly. “What did he look like?” She wanted to hope it couldn’t be her friend, but Cullen only confirmed her fears. Worse, he’d heard rumors among the Ferelden refugees that Anders had been a Grey Warden. “Maker,” she groaned as she passed her hands over her face. “I knew things were bad and getting worse. I haven’t been back to Kinloch Hold in a long time, but this? Did anyone think the Wardens had some part in his actions?” If they did, it might not come back to bite her, personally, but it wouldn’t be unheard of. The Chantry and everyone else was going to want someone to blame, and if Anders was already dead, fingers might start to point toward the Warden who conscripted him. They were already notorious for housing criminals and maleficars in their ranks.

“Rumors mostly, but I don’t know,” he answered somberly. “Hawke and her companions disappeared. The Chantry is on the verge of collapse, the Circles are rebelling in most countries, and the Seekers wanted answers. I was there, so they expected me to be able to tell them everything they needed to hear. I couldn’t, and I don’t know where Hawke went.”

“Don’t look at me,” Audrie snorted with a smirk, “I killed an old god and saved Thedas from a Blight. That should be plenty for one lifetime. They can keep the politics. I might be a mage, but I’ve done my share. Besides, the Wardens are neutral, and we’ve already found out bad things happen when we start sticking our noses into things which don’t have anything to do with darkspawn.”

 “You _are_ mage,” he reminded her with low firmness, “so is Hawke, but you were part of the Circle. You could –“

“I could stay home and deal with whatever is happening out in the forest, too. I mean it, Cullen. I’m a Warden-Commander, and I’m not going to be some kind of symbol for mage freedom or help the templars restore order. My place isn’t getting involved in anything to do with the Chantry, either. I fight hurlocks and try not to get pulverized by ogres while I stay vigilant. In war victory. In peace vigilance. In death sacrifice. That’s the Grey Warden way. The archdemon is nothing but a set of smoking toenails thanks to Alistair and I. End of story.” The familiar stranger across from her smiled to himself as if she’d said something profound, and she stared at him curiously.

“The templars are changing,” he confided, “and it’s worse outside of Ferelden. They’re less interested in the original reason for the order. I always wanted to join them, and begged my parents to let me go as soon as I was old enough. They didn’t want me to, at first, but eventually they saw that I meant it. I watched over you, once, and protected you. Which,” he added hastily at her beady glare, “you don’t need any more. I wanted to - to,” he silently cursed himself when his words fumbled. He hadn’t stammered in years and thought it was beyond him. Just as she had in the tower, she didn’t rush him, patiently waiting for him to finish his sentence. “To be a templar so I could serve the Maker and the people.” He’d almost lost his way under Meredith’s command and his own bitter thirst for seeing mages controlled. Wasn’t there a day where he told Hawke that mages weren’t people? Unlike the words spat at Audrie, he couldn’t claim they were influenced by torture. “I don’t know what the templars have become, but they aren’t doing the Maker’s will. Magic is meant to serve man and never to rule over him. Hawke could have become Viscount, but she didn’t. None of the mages who stayed strong against the temptations of demons and blood magic wanted power. They deserved protection, and we failed them. I don’t know what the Chantry has planned, but I know that if I can’t do what I first admired about the templars, I don’t want to be part of them. I resigned.”

“So,” she read between the lines, “you still want to help people, and thought the Wardens might be the right place for it? Plus the Seekers and everyone else might leave you alone.”

“Hiding had nothing to do with my coming here,” he retorted angrily.

She believed him. Cullen might have changed but he didn’t hide his emotions much better than Alistair. “Okay,” she backed down, “but it’s not simple to join the Wardens. There are secrets and things which I swore never to reveal to anyone outside our own ranks.” Which was completely scrambled the minute she met Varel, and everyone in Ferelden seemed to know she was a Grey Warden in spite of her trying to hide the fact during the Blight. Even so, she tried to uphold the few things Duncan had taught them.

Cullen was a little old for a new recruit and she had to ask herself if she’d be able to deal with his death if he failed the Joining. She was tired of losing friends, and if Alistair’s Calling happened before hers, he wouldn’t die alone. Although she had no plans on traipsing down to the Deep Roads when there were things like Brood Mothers, she knew she would have to answer that demand one day. So would he, but she’d go by sword, poison, or something where she could die with the sun on her face rather than underground. With her luck, the Awakened would be down there waiting on her with a pilfered tea set hoping she’d be their new best friends. The idea amused her and counteracted the possibility of running into the Architect and being used as an experimental rat again. Once was more than enough, and if he ever got near her again, she wasn’t going to let him float away.

“I just don’t know, Cullen. This is a serious request, and with the Blight over with, we’re more careful about our recruits. It’s not as if you don’t have the training. I know you do, and you’re a good man. I also know the Wardens supposedly take anyone who is useful. In the past it’s been a punishment to either join the Wardens or be put to death. I don’t agree with that and it’s not how I run things. Some of them might be misfits, but they’re good people, just like you.” If he lived, he’d make a wonderful Warden, but was it worth risking his life? Should that be her decision instead of his? Not being able to tell people what they were getting into really complicated things. She needed time to think about it, and decided to stall for awhile. “Why don’t you come with us to the Brecilian forest. I can see how well you work with the Wardens before I decide one way or the other.” There was always the Silver Order if he didn’t actually enter the Wardens, assuming he could get off the lyrium with his sanity. As a healer, she’d be glad to help him with that any way she could, but that was a future concern.

It was less than he’d hoped but more than he’d expected. Cullen stood up with military precision and saluted. “Thank you, Commander.”

Resisting the urge to laugh at the absurdity that he would ever want to be under her command rather than obeying his orders, she smiled. Those days had been so much simpler. She’d much preferred being the one taking orders rather than being in charge, but things hadn’t worked out that way. “At ease, Ser Cullen. At ease.” Patting him on the arm much as she had the werewolf, she took the leadership mantle the same way she always had. It was easier to work with people rather than dominating them unless she had no choice. Nathaniel and Sten had always been the worst for challenging her authority, but she’d learned a unique stance of mixed compassion, cajoling and hard orders which worked for her. It had gotten them through Archie, the Mother, and a half dozen other crisis over the past decade. “Before you go, I want you to take a look at these, and tell me if you’ve seen anything like them or heard anything through templar channels that might explain them. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.” She tilted her head and lifted Bulfa’s satchel to spill the enchanted corpses onto her desk.

Cullen’s reaction was close to hers, even with the stench blanketed by the containment magic. “It looks like animals were ... put together somehow?”

“Blood magic?” she ventured, but wasn’t surprised when he shook his head. Unfortunately, he was just as perplexed about it as she was. It had been worth a try. “I’ll have someone show you up to your quarters. Get some rest this evening and we’ll leave at dawn. Meals are informal and the kitchen is usually open when we’ve got a break in our individual schedules. If you need anything, ask someone wearing blue griffons. You can’t miss us.”

Another templar who was from her past wanted to join the Wardens. She could envision a few problems springing up from it, and Alistair wasn’t going to like the idea.

 


	4. Chapter 4

Alistair didn’t like it, and he dropped his pack onto the bed, gesturing with a pair of socks as he spoke. “What if he’s here for the same reason as Rolan?” That had ended terribly, and he worried about Audrie. She’d taken it hard, and suspected she blamed herself for it. There wasn’t any reason that she should. Anders and Rolan might not have liked each other, but they had worked together. Grey Wardens weren’t always as cozy as brothers and sisters. While Alistair preferred it that way so that everyone worked together seamlessly, even he knew it wasn’t always an option. No one had actually recruited or asked for Rolan, either. When they’d found his body, along with the other non-Warden templars, it was obvious why he’d really been sent to the Keep. The Chantry hadn’t ever officially given up on taking Anders back, in spite of a Conscription graced by the monarchy.

“It’s not like that.” Audrie gently took the socks from his hand and tucked them into the pack, rearranging things more efficiently for him. “Cullen isn’t the same kind of person as Rolan.”

“How do you know?” Pulling out a few spare tunics for himself, he passed some clean robes to her. “It’s been a long time since you saw him. Carver said he was in Kirkwall and look at the mess which came out of there. He could be a spy ... Chantry... person... thing.”

Audrie giggled quietly and folded up her clothes. She’d procrastinated until the morning to inform him that they’d be traveling together for the exact reason of the discussion they were having. “He was at Kirkwall,” she conceded quietly. Finishing filling her pack, she laced it up. “I talked to him about it, and he’s been through a lot. Give him a chance, won’t you?” She put her arms around his waist and looked up into his worried brown eyes. “For me?” she prompted, putting a kiss on his chin through the beard.

It wasn’t fair when she did that, and his shaky defenses always melted when she cuddled against him and asked something as if his opinion was the only thing in Ferelden which mattered. He really wanted to come up with a witty rebuke but found himself folding his arms around her, instead. “Alright,” he grumbled, resting his chin on top of her head. “If you really think it’s a good idea. I’m going to be watching him, and I’m still not sure I want to stand next to him as a brother.”

“That’s why we’re going to let him come along on this trip, first. We’ll see if he’s really willing to work together with us. He may not be material for the Wardens, in spite of all his training. There’s the lyrium addiction, first. If he can’t get off of it with his mind stable, he won’t be any good to any of us. I’m not even sure it’s possible to completely get away from it. Rolan was sanctioned by the Chantry so they continued to supply him, but we can’t very well smuggle the stuff just to keep a templar in it unless they use it the same way as mages. How does that work?” she asked in afterthought. “I never have understood why mages don’t get addicted to it but we can use potions to boost our mana.”

It was a question which always bothered him during the Blight, worrying him as her spells grew more powerful out of necessity; demanding more potent lyrium potions to keep her from collapsing. It concerned him that she might suffer the same fate as templars, and realized how little he’d known about it. There hadn’t ever been any ill effects, but he didn’t know why it was different. “I don’t know,” he admitted honestly. “It must be because of your connection to the Fade or your magic.”

“I’ll worry about this if he actually becomes a Grey Warden and stays. We’re not in desperate need right now, so he can always try for a place in the Silver Order if the Wardens aren’t a good fit.”

“I suppose,” Alistair relented, and held her for a few more seconds. “Are you sure we should all be going somewhere at the same time?” When she tilted her chin up, he elaborated, “You and I are going to look into this werewolf situation. You also sent Nathaniel away, so all three of us will be gone at once. Usually there’s at least one senior Warden to help the seneschal.”

“Why?” she teased, poking him lightly in the ribs. “Do you want to stay?” Before he could say anything, she elevated herself up to her toes to kiss him. “The Arling is something which is more or less new. I think we’re handling it well, although anything could be better than the debacle Sophia Dryden started. When it comes down to it, we’ve really only got one job, and that’s to battle the darkspawn. If there’s even the most remote chance of skirmishing packs or trouble from the Awakened coming out of the Deep Roads, we need to see to it. The Keep and Arling will take care of itself. We’ll be leaving it in Varel’s capable hands. If a Warden presence is needed, it isn’t as if there won’t be people here. I’m more worried about Sigrun and Oghren pranking Garavel again.” With a long sigh, she gave him a gentle squeeze. “We should finish packing and get started. It’s going to be a long trip, and we need to make it as quickly as we can. I’m going to stop by the Circle library before we go to the forest, and that’s going to delay us quite awhile. We could go straight there, but I’m hoping there may be something to give us an idea of what we’re going to be dealing with. This has to be some kind of magic, which is another reason I want you with me. Not,” she added as she ran her fingers through his hair, “that I wouldn’t want you anyway. You’re also an expert at dealing with ‘spawn Emissaries, and we might need that again.”

“If there really is Taint there, do you think this might have something to do with the Architect?” That would be just like him, sneaking around underground and twisting things around while claiming it was all for a greater good.

“Maybe. I hope we’re not going to be wasting our time at the Circle, but if there’s anything at all which can help us, I’ll take the chance. This is too strange not to find out what we can first.” She cinched and buckled the straps on his pack. “We still need to gather food which will travel. Bulfa will probably scare off most of the game on the way, and hunting takes time.”

Once he’d finished preparations for travel, Alistair followed the Commander and woman who he loved to pick up the templar. He’d been outfitted by the armorer with generic plate so he didn’t have to wading into the forest without protection, and looked as if he was ready to wrestle an archdemon single handedly. Not trusting the calm, controlled enthusiasm, Alistair vowed to keep an eye on him. Audrie was forgiving by nature, and there were times he questioned her decisions. He had to admit, they usually turned out well, in spite of some of them being guesses. She conceded to that, but she’d always gotten them through things, one way or another.

As if Cullen wasn’t bad enough, he had to subject himself to being sniffed curiously by Bulfa before Audrie insisted the werewolf stay downwind of the horses. Alistair found out early that he didn’t have particularly good balance when he was learning to ride, and Audrie hadn’t ever been closer to a horse than a woodcutting in a book before the Arling. Both of them had learned painfully how to stay in the saddle with the passage of years, but didn’t want to have nervous horses ready to bolt or rear at any moment.

“We’re going to stop at Kinloch Hold for their library,” she announced from the back of a palomino mare who she named Daisy for the gentle disposition. “Cullen, I don’t expect you’ll be welcomed back, so you’ll have to remain behind at camp with Bulfa long enough for the two of us to look into this. If it’s an unknown type of magic or an artifact, that’s the one place we might be able to find information about it.”

Alistair hoped the smug feeling which was bubbling through him didn’t show very much on his face, and he focused on keeping his horse level with Audrie’s. She’d exhausted all the questions she could think of on Blood Magic, what he knew about it, and the three talked themselves into circles for a few hours. By necessity, Audrie also gave Cullen the overall idea of Emissaries to prepare for the possibility of an encounter.

Dusty and a little stiff from travel, they left Bulfa and Cullen behind as Alistair and Audrie took a room at the Spoiled Princess. “I can’t believe you left him alone with the werewolf.” Alistair could barely suppress his mirth as they paid for a room. The inn was almost as gloomy as he remembered it being during the Blight.

“Bulfa will protect him.” She pushed open the door and immediately began to drop a small blizzard over the bathing tub, filling it with rapidly piling snow. It had taken her three years to get such precise control, and a lot of complications with her slipping over ice until she perfected it.

“Right,” Alistair chuckled as he offered to take her pack and stored it with his, “I’m sure that’s Cullen’s first concern.”

Audrie grinned, then used a measured cone of flame to melt everything into the beginning of a steaming bath. She had to do both several times before it was filled to satisfaction, taking a break so she didn’t exhaust herself. “If he really wants to be a Grey Warden, it’s a good early test.” They had a lot worse to face in their early months, and she still had night terrors about that first Ogre she saw, roaring with blood flecked lips and spraying spittle. “We always deal with the weird stuff from dragon cults who think Andraste rose, to darkspawn, to nug wranglers.”

“I liked the nug wrangling,” he insisted wistfully as he kicked his boots off, and held still for her to help work the straps and buckles out of his armor which were more difficult for him to reach. “Those nugs paid for a new pair of boots for the Deep Roads.”

“The dwarves must have thought we were mad running after them and diving into corners to wrestle them down.” She grinned happily and began to peel her robes off with Alistair’s help, some of which involved wandering fingers. “Your hands are cold,” she yelped, jumping a little as he circled her waist with his arms and drew her up against his chest.

“I could warm you up,” he offered innocently, tilting his head around her neck so she could lean back and look into his face. Familiarity had dissolved all the shyness from both of them, and although their intimate time could be limited, they no longer had to worry about the entire camp hearing them.

“I’d like that.” Kissing him, she looped an arm around his neck, and it was all the encouragement he needed to meet her lips with warm enthusiasm. “We did get interrupted by Sigrun last time.”

With his hands on her hips, he turned her around to face him with gentle guidance, and waited for her to step out of her boots. Once they were discarded, he slid her bra band off to free her breasts, and cupped his palms under them. Grinning as she moaned happily in her throat, her nipples hardened beneath his calloused fingers as he kneaded and teased them. “Do you like that, Love?” he taunted in a whisper up next to her ear, drawing the rim between his teeth.

“Do you like this?” she countered in a tight, throaty mutter, rubbing her lower belly against the rising erection straining against the leggings layered beneath his discarded armor.

“Maybe,” he drew the word out a few extra beats and untied her small clothes, meeting her eyes as he tossed them blindly in the general direction of the bed.

“Then you’ll like the rest even better,” she promised, and helped him get out of the remainder of his clothes. “Into the bath before it gets too cold.”

“Bossy,” he quipped as he scooped her up against his chest and walked them both over to the welcomed lap of the warm water. “Hot,” and he didn’t mean the water. Sitting down, he parked her across his lap so they could face each other. It was always more interesting like that.

“This is good,” she uttered quietly as she rubbed soap against his chest, pausing when her breath caught in her throat. His hands found her breasts again, and she pressed her aroused sex against his. The interruption had made things worse. Although they were adults who couldn’t leap into a broom closet every time the urge came on them, she hated being left frustrated. Many nights they were too exhausted to do more than collapse next to each other and sleep. Intimate needs were shoved to the back, and when they tumbled to the front, they were usually intense. Maker, she loved him and wanted him. Moving her hips up and down, she echoed his lusty moans as his head rubbed against her clit, erotically teasing both of them in the eddies of water. “It’s been awhile.”

“Too long,” he agreed, and cut off anything else which might have come out afterward as his lips melted into hers. Their tongues danced together and hands wantonly explored all the perfect, secret places they’d begun to unlock the awkward first time inside her tent. He’d let her take the lead in almost everything until the meeting with Goldanna. After their talk, she’d insisted he stand up for himself and be more confident. Their tent time that night had been nearly as graceless as the first because she’d insisted he give her all the orders. It had been an experience which changed both of them, and what began in private began to influence him to gradually being more assertive in daily life.

Time and practice had smoothed out their kaboodling to familiar pleasure as they got emotionally and physically closer. He kissed the spots on her throat until she softly cried his name in throaty anticipation. Her voice sent a charge all the way down to his erection, because Maker, he liked it when she did that. It reminded him that he was the only one she wanted, and his mouth hungrily met hers again.

It wasn’t their first time in a tub, and he disengaged long enough to use a position they both enjoyed and knew would work. Turning around, she willingly bent forward over the edge of the bath for him. His name purred from her throat, and he couldn’t wait any more. Sliding inside of her with eager anticipation, her tight wetness welcomed him. “Oh Maker.” It _had_ been too long, and he thrust inside of her with unrepentant need. As her heat closed around him, she met him with a lift of her hips, taking him in as deeply as she could. They lost any sense of time as he rocked urgently inside of her. When she cried out in climax, he gripped her hips and didn’t slacken his pace until he had emptied himself deeply.

The second time, they washed each other languidly while she sat in his lap again, talking about inconsequential things between erotic promises. She straddled him that time, taking him while they faced each other. He always loved that position because he could watch her face, kiss her, and touch her breasts. As always, she set the pace in a gradual buildup, his head almost leaving her completely before she plunged over him again. Before they were done, he was sure his head was going to explode. When she tightened around him with her orgasm, his fingers were vigorously rubbing her clit. Both of them shouted a few things which should have made the Maker strike them with lightning in those moments of ultimate pleasure. Thankfully, Alistair long since abandoned that concern.

Once they were in bed together, still damp from the tub, she pillowed her head on his chest. Sated and content, her fingers lazily circled his nipples, and they didn’t need to talk. Pulling a blanket over them so she wouldn’t get cold, any budding jealousy Alistair had against Cullen washed away. It no longer mattered to him if the former templar joined the Wardens, because he would always be the one most important to Audrie. She might not be his wife by Chantry law, but they may as well have been. They loved each other, and it wouldn’t ever change.

  __


	5. Chapter 5

While she had no aversion to the Circle Tower, Audrie had stopped thinking of it as her home when she’d returned to help stop Uldred’s revolt. It looked ominous jutting out of the water, as they were rowed toward it. The long boat ride was no less chilly than any other time, but Kestor did his best to pass the time with idle conversation. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you here, Youngster. I remember you had to go across with that templar who took control of Lizzy.”

 

Alistair knew she was prone to get cold more easily than he did, and unhooked his fur cloak to drape around her shoulders. Gratefully, she burrowed into it like a turtle, letting his lingering smell pleasantly envelop her. Leaning closer to him, she took advantage of his emanating body warmth and watched a giant, pale fish flicker just beneath the shining surface of the lake. A jaw full of teeth flashed as it darted at a smaller fish then made its malevolent way deeper. Anders must have paid homage to some ancient god of luck like Imhar when he escaped, even if he didn’t openly worship him. Something had kept the vicious monsters from ripping his flailing limbs when he desperately paddled across the water in one of his many bids for freedom. Part of the reason she learned shapeshifting from Morrigan during the Blight was to give herself wings so she’d never have to worry about going into the water. All streams and lakes made her nervous unless they were clear or shallow enough to see the bottom. 

 

“It’s just as cold as I remember,” she told Kestor, pulling the folds of Alistair’s cloak tighter around her shoulders. Unlike her, the two men were impervious to the bite in the air. “It _has_ been a long time since I’ve been back. Is Greagoir still Knight-Commander?” 

 

“That he is, and I suppose he’s going to be surprised to see you.”

 

Audrie’s smile flopped into a rueful twist. It had been years, so she hoped Greagoir finally forgave her for the fiasco with Jowan. She would have done it all over again for a friend, but the ‘plan’ the three of them cooked up was the most idiotic thing she’d ever done in her life. It had more or less worked out, but only because Duncan had snatched her out from under a livid Knight-Commander who wanted her severely punished. She never found out exactly what he had planned for her, but aiding a maleficar to destroy his phylactery and escape wasn’t innocently running off like Anders. She would have surely been facing solitary confinement or flogging, and the Knight-Commander didn’t forget easily. He was still as pleasant as a amorous deepstalker the last time she’d seen him, in spite clearing out the Tower of abominations.

 

She was relieved to get back to solid land, and scrambled out of the boat ahead of Alistair, returning his cloak to him once she had both boots firmly on dirt and stone. “Thanks Kestor. If this takes too long and you have to leave, I’ll light the torch.” It was the standard way of signaling him if he didn’t stay at the Tower dock. “This may take awhile.” As much as she hoped they’d be able to walk to a shelf and check three or four books, she knew it would never be that easy. 

 

The path up the stairs from the cavernous dock where the Circle got food and other supplies was eerily familiar. Audrie had to quell the weird impulse that she was skulking where she didn’t belong and scurry back to her Apprentice quarters. The phantom feeling made her smirk to herself in the darkness, and approach the templars standing watch with their faceless helms pulled down. She squared her shoulders and marched up to them without twitching an eyelash. “Would you tell Knight-Commander Greagoir that the Warden Commander Audrie Amell is here to see him?” When in doubt, use fancy titles.

 

Either they were too green to have been at the post very long or hadn’t forgotten the role which made Grey Wardens heroes in Ferelden. One of them went clanking off immediately to fetch Greagoir, and he was just as happy to see her as she’d imagined he would be. The title must have worked to get him to speak to them so quickly. Glowering, the Knight-Commander looked down at her. Did he ever give up a grudge? She really didn’t dislike him, but the whole mess with Jowan happened a really long time ago. “Hello, Ser Greagoir,” she bid him politely, “I have a situation and I’d like to borrow the library.”

 

It might have been the fact she wasn’t trying to grab troops or drag anyone off which thawed him a little. “What kind of situation?”

 

Obviously he’d relinquished his true right to control over her life, but wasn’t entirely ready to let go of his authority over any mage, even a Grey Warden. She decided he was usually fair and direct, so honesty was the best way of dealing with him. “It may involve unknown magic. I don’t know if it’s blood magic or something else. If there’s any record or information we might find, it would help us a great deal.”

 

Looking at her for a long, hard moment, the templar demanded, “And if it is blood magic, will you be calling in the templars to deal with the maleficar?”

 

Resisting the urge to either cringe or roll her eyes, Audrie planted hands on her hips and glared back at him. “Ser, if there is one thing I’ve never dabbled in and never will, it’s blood magic. I had no idea Jowan was lying to me all those years ago, and I was a naive girl who thought that a pair of starry eyed lovers could somehow escape and make a life outside the tower. It was stupid of me, but really, in the scope of what happened later, I think I did alright against a raging inferno of a dragon which lead hordes of darkspawn. Ashvale has a chantry doesn’t it?” she demanded coolly. “If there’s really a maleficar involved, I’ll appeal to the templars for help. I don’t want them running free any more than you do.”

 

Alistair wanted to jump in on her behalf, but wasn’t sure exactly what to put in. The Wardens occasionally used blood mages, even if it wasn’t something Audrie tolerated in the Order. Saying anything to oppose it would make both of them sound like hypocrites.

 

“You haven’t changed,” Greagoir sighed, more exasperated or mildly amused than angry. “You may use the library if you wish. It’s been rebuilt and sorted since the last time you were here.”

 

“Thank you,” she told the grizzled veteran sincerely. “We’ll get this done as quickly as possible.” She didn’t imagine the Circle got many visitors, and didn’t invite people to stay overly long.

 

She knew the way, but an apple cheeked young man with a smattering of freckles on his nose intercepted her. Partnered with the carrot orange mop of hair sticking out from the crown of his head, Audrie found it impossible to take him seriously. The attempt at a tough scowl made him more comical than frightening, but the Warden managed to carry herself with grave humility while they were shown the very familiar path to the library. Just because the youth looked harmless didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of smiting her into next week.

 

“There’s so many books here,” Alistair breathed over the muffle of pages turning, soft leather shoes scuffing on the stones, scratching of quills, rustle of templar armor stance, and whispered conversation. “How are we going to find the right one?”

 

“They’re ordered by sections. That won’t make it easy, but it will help us narrow d–“

 

“Audrie?” A tall young man in enchanter’s robes with brown hair growing around his ears and familiar blue grey eyes came loping toward her on long legs.

 

She stared at him for several seconds before she realized who it must be. “Connor? Is that you?” His shy, awkward smile was confirmation enough, and she impulsively put her hands on his shoulders to look into his face. “You’ve sprung up like a young tree! Look at you!” Getting some scandalized glowers from a few of the older mages in Enchanters robes she lowered her voice. “You’re so handsome and grown up.”

 

He hadn’t ever forgotten what she had done for him, freeing him from the grip of a Desire demon by chasing it down in the Fade. He’d thought about writing to her, but never knew what to say. By the time he was old enough to thank her properly, it had been too long. “I just went through my Harrowing last month,” he told her in such a low whisper that she almost didn’t hear him. “It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be.”

 

She wished she could have said the same about hers, but gave him a congratulatory pat on the back. “Well done.”

 

“Have you heard from Eamon lately?” Alistair asked when he had the opportunity. He and the man who raised him early in life has been mending bridges. With a twinge of guilt, the Warden remembered he hadn’t visited or written in months. 

 

“Father comes to visit me sometimes.” Evidently the Arl’s status allowed him Circle privileges most people either didn’t want or pursue. “I think mother is still disappointed that I can never be Arl, but I’ve learned how to control my magic here. It’s,” he shrugged slightly, “not bad here. I heard there’s a mess in Kirkwall and everyone is really nervous. You don’t live here anymore, can you tell us what’s going on?”

 

There was a loaded beehive of trouble, and Audrie smiled politely at a lurking templar. “Come help me look for a book,” she whispered so they weren’t as obvious. She didn’t want Greagoir think she’d begun to sow dissention, particularly considering Anders. The Knight-Commander was sure to have heard all the rumors, and she wasn’t ever going to be his favorite mage. 

 

While they browsed, she kept her sentences short and mingled with the subject of what she was hunting for. Handing Alistair books occasionally to help with the browsing, she focused as she skimmed pages, and gave the freshly minted mage words of caution concerning Kirkwall. Greagoir wasn’t a vindictive man, and she couldn’t imagine him turning around and annulling the Circle or anything radical without something like Uldred. He’d accepted Irving’s word that he wasn’t infested with demons and that the Circle could be salvaged. That did not mean he couldn’t be removed if the Chantry insisted, and replaced with a harder Commander who would turn a blind eye to gross abuse. It was a sticky problem, and she didn’t want to be guilty of inciting riot inside the tower. 

 

She’d never been treated particularly poorly by the templars while growing up. Kinloch Hold had been her home and sanctuary. When Duncan took her out into the wide world, every leaf blowing or cricket call had put her into a panic. Usually the great walls of the tower were a safe haven, even if it did hinder their freedom to run freely. She’d never willingly go back to living there, but lacked any outright vehemence toward the vigilant templars who were like Cullen. How much longer before the changes he’d described would come to Ferelden? For a moment, she wished she had a decent relationship with Greagoir and could ask him what impact the uprising, Seekers, Kirkwall, and Chantry were going to have at home. The Chantry might easily be reacting rashly from the death of a Grand Cleric at the hands of a mage. If they abruptly decided to start stamping out all mages in spite of protests from decent men and women in the ranks of the templars, they could. Only the Chantry had the power to call a Divine March, and something like Kirkwall might be enough to light a fuse. The mages deserved to be able to defend themselves. Knowledge was power, and Connor had been through much more than the average boy.

 

“Audrie,” Alistair interrupted her thoughts, guiding an open book in her direction. She’d been staring at the same page for nearly five minutes and absorb a single word. From the look on Alistair’s face, he’d noticed but didn’t aggravate her about it. She’d always had a weakness for tuning out her surroundings, and it had gotten her hurt. That hadn’t been in a library, however. “Here,” he pointed out a passage on book, “take a look at this.”

 

Leaning toward it, she drew everyone closer to a light. Her eyes darted over the writing so quickly she had to go back over it twice to digest everything. “.... said to keep victims alive with the use of lyrium or blood to fuel it. Scholars have made many hypothesis it might not exist, or that the Table of Pain may have a demon bound into it by the original owner. Learned men scoff at the rumors it has power of life, death, and immortality. Gruesome experimentation has been linked to it which involved placing a woman’s eyes into another man’s skull. If it ever existed, it is believed lost since .....” She read it again, but there wasn’t any more useful information in the brief pages of the chapter. 

 

For another hour they pored over the shelves for any other scraps they could find, but it yielded nothing. “I don’t like the sound of that,” Alistair muttered. 

 

“Do you think it’s real?” Connor asked curiously as he gently closed a tome on _Artifacts: Elven, Dwarf, Barbarian and Tevinter._

 

“I don’t know,” Audrie admitted, “but the Wardens need to find out.” The Architect had a perverse love of experimentation, and few scruples. If he had managed to get control of such a device, it needed to be destroyed, and preferably along with the darkspawn emissary.

 


	6. Chapter 6

Cullen had quietly endured the few nights at camp with a creature which might walk and talk, but he couldn’t deny how much it still seemed like a monster. Bulfa was social and hunted for them, eating out of the templar’s sight, and bringing back food for human hands to prepare. Most of it was badly burned by the time Cullen got done with it, but in all his journeys from Ferelden to Kirkwall, he had spent very little time as a Knight-Hunter. His stations had been to guard the mages at Kinloch Hold or the Gallows; with a voracious desire to see mages kept under Chantry control. He’d idolized Meredith at first. She’d seemed the strong Knight- Commander which Greagoir hadn’t been, keeping iron control where the male templar had failed. Time had pulled the blinders from his face, and if being part of the Grey Wardens meant association with a werewolf, then he’d endure it more easily than some of the other things at the Gallows. Too many times he’d forced himself to remain under orders, or had his wrists tied because he was outranked. He was done turning away from what was right.

 

Sleep hadn’t come easily to him since the mass murders Anders committed, incited by Meredith’s abuse and Elthina’s inaction. It didn’t steal over him for long hours while a werewolf stood watch, either, and Cullen was relieved when Audrie and Alistair returned. Packing up the camp was a picture of efficiency for the Wardens, obviously having done it so many times the actions were automatic. He was getting more proficient, but his lack of experience outside the stone walls showed with everything but his hand with horses. 

 

What they’d found didn’t put his mind at ease, and they told him everything they’d learned or guessed as they rode as quickly as possible back to the Brecilian Forest through a bone chilling drizzle. At least Bulfa had the courtesy to step away from them when he periodically shook out his guard hairs. Cullen wondered how much good it could actually do, and the former templar tucked his chin against the stinging pellets of rain hitting his cheekbones. “If this artifact exists, how did it end up out in a forest?” Logically, it seemed like a very strange place for a powerful Tevinter creation.

 

“The Veil is really thin in there,” Audrie speculated aloud, “because of a lot of wars. Recent battles can’t have helped. There’s a lot of spirit and ghost activity. Dead bodies are animated, the trees are infested by demons to make them come alive, and the dead are restless.”

 

“There’s also ruins,” Alistair put in, wiping moisture from his eyes, almost wistfully missing the Tower robes Audrie used to wear. When they got wet, they clung, and he’d tried not to stare very much. It hadn’t fooled Wynne. The Warden armor protected her better, and he wouldn’t trade that for anything. It didn’t mean he didn’t miss one tiny aspect of the Blight. “We found some pretty odd things inside the few old places were in.” Elven armor and an ancient phylactery had survived centuries before Audrie released the trapped spirit inside of it. Duncan had mentioned an ancient mirror of some kind from which he’d hoped to look into because he suspected it might be tainted. Without enough time before the Battle of Ostagar, he’d never gotten the opportunity because he’d chosen to go to the Circle for Audrie. Although Alistair didn’t know if the mirror was real or not, but if it was, that meant a large, powerful, evil ... magic thing ... had been laying around for who knew how long? “Makes me shudder all over and brings a tear to the eye when I think of all the wonderful things we could be missing,” he snorted mirthfully.

 

Audrie shot him a tolerant look which Cullen interpreted correctly as adoration, and she sighed heavily. “I hope it’s simpler than that, but Alistair is right. There’s been some very weird things uncovered in that particular forest. Anything is possible.” She wondered if Cullen could still carry maps in his head the way he did at Kinloch Hold because he and the werewolves were the only ones who didn’t seem to be lost as they followed game trails. At first they seemed marked and obvious, but as was the nature of any forest, they’d vanish and left her feeling more lost than ever. Her sense of direction was abysmal, and she’d relied on Alistair, Nathaniel, her mabari and the stars to keep them from falling off the edge of the world more times than she could count. Give her an ogre and she’d destroy it with fire and ice. Drop her in the middle of a strange place as ask her to get out? She was doomed. 

 

Audrie held her arm out, and Cullen pulled the reins of his horse up obediently. His danced on its hind hooves and pawed nervously with the front. “Easy,” Cullen told it, “easy. Whoa. Good boy.”

 

Audrie waited for her own horse to calm down, although it still tossed its head and dilated its nostrils. “Alistair, do you feel that?”

 

“What?” he instinctively whispered and his face crunched together in concentration, blinking water from his lashes. “Wait. I think I do.” 

 

Cullen looked between the two of them, nonplussed, then at the werewolf who rumbled a low growl in his throat, audible even from the distance. “We’re close, Wardens,” Bulfa announced. “I can smell death on the air.”

 

Audrie had been a vessel for the soul of an archdemon, however briefly, and it left her hypersensitive to the flow of the taint. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end, and the feeling of ants crawling under her skin intensified almost painfully. “It’s a Warden gift,” she told Cullen distractedly, not going any farther than that. “There’s darkspawn in the area. If we follow it, we’re sure to get to the bottom of this. Watch yourselves. I don’t feel like there’s very many, but sometimes single darkspawn can be as terrible as a dozen. Bulfa, we should go the rest of the way on foot. Would you stay here and make sure our horses are safe?” 

 

Tactically, it would have been better to have taken the werewolf with them. They were a natural killing force which were as powerful as a golem in their unique way. Unfortunately, she was attached to Daisy more than she should have been, along with the other horses. Leaving them tied, alone in the forest, without any defense against natural wolf packs or even the werewolves was heartless. People could accuse her of being too soft if they wanted to, or making dumb decisions which could get other people hurt. It didn’t matter, because she’d lost her innocence and her optimism was bruised by cynicism. She wasn’t going to lose her humanity, too. “I don’t want them to get hurt.”

 

“Are you certain?” Bulfa asked, eyeing the restless animals and wondering how he was supposed to keep them from dashing off. If he chased them, they were only going to run faster, and it would be hard not to bring one down for food.

 

Cullen didn’t approve of the sentimentality, but kept his lips shut, not questioning her decision. He caught her hesitation before she confirmed, “Yes. We’ll come back for them.”

 

“At your order, Warden.” The werewolf took a post downwind of the equines, and vanished into the underbrush to patiently wait. Audrie also didn’t want to risk Bulfa getting the darkspawn sickness. Having Cullen with them was more than she’d have wanted, but a templar would be even more useful than a werewolf if they were going to face the Architect again. 

 

Supposedly there were Wardens in the past who could differentiate between the different spawn in a group. She could feel when there were vast numbers, nearly expelling her lunch when they marched in to help Amaranthine because it had been so overwhelming. To know a shriek from a genlock was well beyond her, however. “Let’s keep this as quiet as we can,” she ordered softly.

 

Cullen was never quick on his feet or clever like the few specially trained units in the Gallows. Their armor had been substantially lighter and many of them knew how to fight with bows or double swords rather than larger, cumbersome weapons and shields. Cullen and Alistair were both as subtle as a half grown dragon charging across snapping branches, patches of soggy weeds, and squelching fields of tall grass. Audrie was only better because of her armored robes instead of plate, but she was no rogue. “Everything for a league is going to know we’re here,” she grumbled through gritted teeth.

 

“That’s me,” Alistair sighed as a low tree branch scraped noisily across his breastplate. “Mr. Stealth. There was a woman who helped us during the Blight. I never could get over how quiet she was. I could never do that.”

 

Cullen awkwardly climbed around a decayed tree stump and nearly stumbled over roots concealed in clumps of grass. “Me either,” he had to agree. It wasn’t the most hospitable place for anyone who didn’t have paws. 

 

Unknown to either of them, Audrie was thinking the same. Becoming a wolf would have allowed her faster and less noticeable passage, but it would have forced her to abandon her companions. The ability to cast more effective spells would likewise be lost, so she kept on two legs as they crept toward another the gaping mouth of another set of ruins. The pillars were straight, no longer holding what had once been a grand archway, but standing in spite of the chinks and pieces knocked out. Stone walls had withstood ages, losing only some of the outside stairways and almost vanishing beneath veils of greenery. The trees had tried to encroach and reclaim the land for themselves, but the ancient edifice stood staunch against most of it the same way Ostagar had. It wasn’t as impressive as the place which she’d taken part of the fateful battle, but it was close.

 

“Underground?” Alistair didn’t look any happier than she or Cullen at the obvious destination they were going to have to get to. “At least it will be warmer and dry.”

 

Audrie nodded, setting her lips grimly and thumping her staff firmly on the ground. “It could be tunnels leading down toward the Deep Roads or caves. I don’t know if there’s actual Deep Roads through here, but even if there aren’t, the darkspawn have proven that they can tunnel effectively for themselves. They come up under your feet, sometime without warning,” she told Cullen, and was impressed when he nodded without flinching. “Watch your footing and be ready for it. We’ll try and keep stone under us wherever we can.” 

 

In her experience traipsing all over Ferelden for the past years and stamp Maker knew what from the face of the world, she’d found that the places most likely to be left were looted treasure chambers, temples, or extremely well fortified areas. They were built with more care to structurally withstand time, so she looked for a way down into the bowels of the edifice. Dark, enclosed spaces didn’t particularly sit well with her, and she activated flaming weapons to give everyone illumination. It also made them a target, but she’d long since decided it was preferable to see what was coming than to run into its face with nothing but a thin layer of blackness between them.

 

They spent three quarters of an hour wandering, painfully aware of how loud they were. Cobwebs tangled in their hair, and Audrie slapped them urgently off her face. “I hate spiders,” she muttered with a vehemence Cullen didn’t recognize. While he watched quizzically, she spat against the gossamer strand she could feel on her lips. “I was fine with them until this Senior Enchanter at the Tower asked me to clear out the storeroom,” she explained crossly. “I was told there were spiders. Nobody mentioned they were the size of cart horses and wanted to truss me up, paralyze me, and suck the juices out of my internal organs. I was all by myself, too. I hate spiders, including the little ones.” 

 

She also had to resist the urge to pry open every chest or investigate every musty corner. The Blight had given Audrie a magpie desire to hoard things she could use as barter with a merchant. A few coppers grew into a silver which might buy warm boots to keep out frostbite or put food in bellies when the snow started to fall. “It looks deserted,” she opined, deliberately not looking inside of a deteriorating crate. Alistair feel the crawling in his blood just as she did. They both knew the little trio wasn’t alone, but Audrie wanted to test their newest potential recruit.

 

“Not entirely. Someone has been through here recently.” Cullen hadn’t spent much time in the field hunting apostates, but he’d been exposed to enough research and chases in Kirkwall to notice the most blatant signs. “The spiderwebs are all broken, and the places where dust should cover stone are too clean.” Inspired, he crouched down where a powdery coating of earth wasn’t ruined by their own footprints. Following it with the light of an illuminated dagger, he pointed to a huge, partial pawprint. “Is that from a werewolf? I can’t tell how fresh it is, or if it was running or walking.”

 

Audrie looked over his shoulder and nodded. “It has to be, doesn’t it?” The taint left a chilly brush over her skin, so she’d known they were in the right place, in spite of outward signs of emptiness. “Good work.” To her relief, Alistair didn’t bristle at the compliment, and had come to terms with any pangs of jealousy.

 

“I think …” Cullen stopped again, staring intently at the ground. “These other tracks don’t make any sense. They’re bigger than a werewolf and shaped differently.”

 

“More mutations?” Alistair ventured, looking more closely. The pads were bigger and rounder. 

 

“Strange,” Audrie opined and followed the intermittent trail to a huge set of doors. The fact they stood open wasn’t encouraging. “Something was drug down here, I think. See the marks there, next to the paw prints? Let’s go. Stay alert. I think we’re getting close.”


	7. Chapter 7

Audrie almost wished they’d missed the obscure trail when they found the first thing, and she took a half step backward. Bile churned in her stomach and bubbled to the back of her throat, making her swallow so she wouldn’t gag. Not realizing she’d moved, she bumped into Alistair’s armored chest, and the chill clinging to the metal seeped it through her robes. A cold fingered gauntlet steadied her, and all three of them came to an abrupt halt. “What in the name of…,” she croaked once she trusted her voice, “is that?” 

 

The room had opened up into a honeycomb of eerie glowstones, illuminating a huge, yawning cavern which once housed a vast treasure chamber. Once grand, it had been looted, and fallen to ruination.Pillars of faint light and stark black edges were the only relief to their strained senses. All three were armed and constantly braced for an attack which never came. Tendrils of light flickered across armor in a bloodless pale pink color reminiscent of lit, decayed guts. Behind a clear, shimmering shield, something twisted and hairy was suspended from the ground, curled up in a position of mortal pain. It’s bloody muzzle was pulled back to expose teeth too big for it, and globular round eyes were popping out of a skull, staring at nothing. Fur and scales were patched over its hide, with a long, arched neck and body which otherwise looked werewolven. 

 

“Is it alive?” Alistair’s disgusted whisper made Audrie’s heart skip a beat. 

 

Her healing abilities were thwarted by the magical barrier, but she wasn’t sure she would have wanted to try and mend the deformed, silently screaming thing. “I’m not sure. I can’t get past the shield.” Experimentally, she put her hand flat against the invisible wall and recoiled, rubbing her fingertips together. “It’s almost like...”

 

“The cage Uldred had me in,” Cullen grated promptly, and blocked out a surge of memories which were as foul as the thing frozen in excruciating death. 

 

“I was going to say like they used in Honnleath,” Audrie countered immediately. They all needed focus, and losing Cullen to the past could be fatal. “You’re probably closer. It feels... wrong. Like blood, corruption and the Fade ripped out and twined together somehow.” The same way Uldred’s had. “Why would anyone do that, and what is this thing? It looks like someone took pieces of a dragon and put them together with a werewolf. Could this be the missing pack members? How is that even possible?” The idea sent cold snakes of shivers down her spine, and she shut up. When she got nervous she tended to babble a hundred questions, and the look of amused affection on Alistair’s face made her irrationally grumpy. “Well,” she grated in a whisper, “you explain it, then.” 

 

“The lengths a blood mage will go has no limits,” Cullen hissed furiously, and his sword twitched in his hands, ready to batter down a maleficar. He couldn’t reach with Uldred when it happened, but this time he wasn’t powerless and he’d kill whatever creature was playing the Maker. “We have to find out who did this and stop them.”

 

“The feeling of the Taint is still down here.” Audrie glanced toward Alistair, and he nodded curtly. The lighting made it look as if he had no eyes, and was staring at her from a skull. Shaking off the thought, she bit her lower lip pensively. “Blood mages and artifacts aren’t technically under Grey Warden jurisdiction, but the darkspawn are.” Cutting her eyes toward Cullen she gave him a small smile. “And if a maleficar happens to get in the way, we’ll have to cut him down.” Greagoir would have preferred her to turn it over to the local templars, but if there were darkspawn, it was still Warden business.

 

Cullen smiled grimly, and flanked the Commander of the Grey with Alistair on the opposite side. More experiments floated eerily under phosphorescent glowstones, suspended in poses with limbs twisted back on themselves in repulsive angles which hadn’t come out of nature. Legs sprouted out of areas where nothing should have been joined, wrinkled flesh folded around teeth protruding out of a belly, and eyes had been grafted into something which might have been a leg.

 

Lifting her wrist up to her mouth, Audrie grimaced on the sour taste at the back of her throat and nearly rammed into Cullen when one of the horrors inside twitched. Putting his arms out to catch her before she stumbled, he steadied her. “Is it still alive?” His voice was a hoarse whisper, and the faces of both Audrie and Alistair looked nightmarishly pale with unnatural shadows. It reminding him too much of drowned corpses. 

 

“I hope not - but I think it might be.” The revulsion in her low words was palpable, and the mage hastily took a step forward as if to prove she was capable of meeting anything headlong, no matter how disgusted. “I’ve faced down an Archdemon,” she muttered between clenched teeth, “which wasn’t anywhere near as horrible as those spiders. How bad can this be?” She paused and bit her bottom lip. “I said that out loud, didn’t I?”

 

“Yes, Love.” Alistair couldn’t completely subdue the humor in his voice. Serious again, he brought her attention around to another corner. “Look at this.”

 

Reluctantly, she squared her shoulders in nervous determination. Peering closer at the inside one of the tubes, she could make out parts of something. “Genlock? What’s left of one,” she answered herself. “That explains the Taint coming from this place.”

 

“Some of these don’t look so,” Alistair hung on the last word, looking for the best description, “tampered with. Look at these.” He gestured at some of the other specimens which had smaller eyes and blunt snout. There were over a dozen which neither she or Alistair recognized, but he was right. They looked as natural as darkspawn ever did, and not as if a madman had turned their flesh to clay. “Could they be some new kind of darkspawn? You said you saw some in Amaranthine.”

 

“Look at their armor.” She got so close that her nose tingled from the softly humming barrier. “It looks ancient. I don’t think these are new ‘spawn. They’re old ... really old. Cullen, remember some of the paintings and woodcuts in the tower from before the Orlesian occupation? It looks like that, at least, maybe even older.”

 

Cullen had been sheltered from most of the Blight’s end, being forced to stay in the Circle to recuperate from his ordeal. The stories he’d heard didn’t exaggerate on how monstrous darkspawn were, but no worse than the flesh corded and melting from the faces of the abominations he’d seen. It was stunted, about the size of a dwarf, with small ears, a pushed out face, pale skin, and shaggy facial hair. Blotting out the monster, his eyes traced the armor, matching it to memory. “It’s centuries old, at least.”

 

Audrie cut her eyes toward her fellow Grey Warden. “Not from the first Blight, surely?”

 

“Surely,” Alistair agreed, although not with much conviction. “Very creepy.” With false cheeriness he elevated one finger and asked, “Can we go home now? We might make it back in time for lunch. Lunch always makes things better.”

 

Smiling, Audrie leaned her shoulder into his, putting both of them more at ease. Cullen wouldn’t fully understand. It might not seem like the time for jokes, but the distraction broke tension. It kept them both alert. “Soon,” she promised. “Something has to be doing all of this, and I’d like to know what it is.”

 

“I’d like to know _where_ it is,” Alistair muttered, nervously hefting his shield and keeping his sword point to the front.

 

“This place is like some sort of sick treasury,” Audrie grunted in disgust, “but whose?” A Blight werewolf was still intact, with a shorter muzzle, and eyes more human than lupine. Ears which should have been long and triangular were sunk lower on the skull and rounded. Another attempt at fusing it together with something, or different kind of werewolf from some forgotten time like the darkspawn? Humans and elves, perfectly preserved, were wearing some strange riding harnesses which she didn’t recognize. “These people look like they rode something. Look.” Their sleek armor fitted snugly to their bodies, and it was styled to look avian. “Air would roll off something like that, and look at all the padding beneath. It would have kept out the sting of hard wind.” Dragon riders? Like the people in the Cult of Andraste?

 

“There’s a pattern.” Cullen’s voice wasn’t higher than a whisper, but it carried eerily between the mage shields, almost reverberating. “We see corpses which are mutilated, then the bodies of creatures which are whole. It goes back to the unnatural ones, then to things which are intact. Also, the farther we go, the newer the armor looks.”

 

Alistair’s face contorted weirdly under ripples of green light, making his eyes shine like something which slithered out of the Void. “Are you saying that whatever is down here has been around that long?” 

 

“I hope not.” Audrie looked over her shoulder at both of them. “What? Can’t I try and be optimistic once in awhile? I don’t want to fight some centuries old ... thing... that’s been shoving bodies into magical tubes then trying to cram monsters together. I want to go back home and argue with Woolsey. I killed that stupid Archdemon, and I deserve a break. Come on,” she grumbled in exasperation and dragged the two men down a dark set of stairs which was free of dust and clinging spider webs. “This probably leads down to either another level of what used to be a dungeon, or catacombs, or something just as horrible.” 

 

“Do you feel that?” The Commander asked Alistair, and he nodded curtly as a new wash of the taint spilled over them. “Sod,” she muttered, then shrugged and carefully eased open a tremendous old door. She pressing her eye to the crack and squinting out into the new room. Bars lined a long corridor and familiar looking snouts poked between a few of them, whining piteously. “It looks like we found the werewolves,” she hissed, rolling her eye as far as she could from side to side. “I don’t see anything else.” She wasn’t good with stealth, and berated herself for not bringing Nathaniel or Sigrun with them. Traps were almost certain, and they’d been lucky not to stumble into anything, yet. It couldn’t be helped this late in their excursion, so she gulped and braced herself. “Follow me.” 

 

Cullen suspected her bravado, but did as she commanded, clumsily trying to keep from rattling his armor with every movement. The snuffling, whines, and restlessness of huge animals masked a lot of his motion, but he couldn’t help thinking it was too loud.

 

“Warden?” A silver and black werewolf tipped his nose into the air after he spoke, trying to catch her scent. An eye had been recently gouged out and the tips of all his claws chopped off seamlessly at the first digit. She vaguely remembered his markings from the army who stood with her at Fort Drakon. He leaned his furry face against the front of the cage. “The Lady said she would send for you right before I was taken.” His tongue worked painfully against a dry mouth, and he squinted through his remaining eye.

 

Audrie winced and spared a healing spell for the werebeast, but she couldn’t replace what had already been taken from him. Claws and the eye didn’t grow back. “Taken how? By whom?” He desperately needed something to drink, and she took her water skin from her hip. Pouring a little into the cup of her hand, she ignored Alistair’s look of warning and let the werewolf gratefully lap it up. At least it would give him some relief, and his taut body relaxed subtly.

 

Cullen cautiously moved forward to watch for trouble ahead of them, but it was a long room with torches lit in the walls. Another door lead out, so he assigned himself to it while Alistair positioned himself to watch the one they’d just come through.

 

“We don’t know what it wants,” a younger female werewolf whimpered from the back of the cage, and from what Audrie could see, her arm was limp with a sharpened shoulder bone sealed on the outside of her flesh. “It takes us and mutilates us.”

 

“It tries to make new things,” another voice moaned from across the hallway. “When we’re strapped to the table we can’t move. There’s only pain, and it takes and takes. The lucky ones die. The others have new things put onto them. Some experiments are ‘successful’ and serve him.”

 

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Audrie promised. “All of you bu–“

 

“Maker have mercy!” Cullen jumped backward as a massive, mangy paw took a swipe at him through ancient iron bars. It nearly caught him, and claws skittered across his armor. “Audrie, come look at this!” 

 

She didn’t want to leave the ailing wolves, but carefully crept to Cullen’s side. Alistair was right behind her, and his jaw fell open.

 

“Andraste’s flaming sword, is that –?“

 

“It’s corrupted, but...” Audrie couldn’t take her gaze off of it. Huge, grimy, tattered wings fanned out and beat the air angrily. Each one must have been the size of a man, and the windstorm nearly threw her off her feet. Baleful red eyes burned out of an avian head, but half the feathers were molted off for crusted, patchy, flaking flesh. Leonine claws flexed against stone, and its tufted tail lashed in its own refuse behind it. Even filthy, twisted, and perverted by the darkspawn sickness, the creature was unmistakable. “It’s... that’s.... but...”

 

“A griffon,” Alistair blurted out in awe. “Still alive. It’s tainted, but they’re supposed to all be dead. How is it even possible, and what’s it doing _here_?” 

 

Audrie remembered the people in the strange armor who she thought were dragon riders. Andraste’s grace. What if they were the bodies of Grey Wardens or something like them? That didn’t explain how any of it had ended up underground in the Brecilian forest or why someone was kidnaping werewolves, but could it be possible?

 

“That’s how they get us,” a relatively healthy werewolf grunted close enough to make Cullen startle. “That’s what caught us. It serves the pain-giver in this place. He awakened it from the tubes of light and -- hrrr -- it obeys.”

 

“How…?” It didn’t matter. Wardens trained griffons once, so it wasn’t unthinkable that someone else managed to do the same. Even with it eaten up with darkspawn taint, it was the last of its kind. She didn’t want to destroy it on principle. They were extinct and their aeries had been empty for centuries according to all Warden lore. The pathetic excuse and shadow in front of them was all that was left of their kind. If only there were a cure for the plague, or they had a healthy breeding pair. Wardens might have soared again without being like her, using paltry shape shifting skills. “I’m sorry,” she told it with a tight throat. She hated killing animals almost as much as she did people, but the griffon was even worse. “Step back,” she told Cullen and Alistair firmly. “It’s going to explode.”

 

“Are you sure?” Alistair echoed her own sentiment, but she pleaded with her eyes not to make it harder.

 

“I never thought I would see such a creature.” Cullen had been on the wrong end of Audrie’s Walking Bomb spell when she was an apprentice, and obediently backed up. 

 

“Let’s see if we can get someone’s attention while we’re at it.” She was tired of creeping around, waiting for something to leap out at them, exploiting shadows and its labyrinth to its advantage. Every time something twitched or the light jerked at the corner of her eye, anxiety spiked. She poised for battle only to have it be a false alarm. Her body was flooded with the excess tension, and she was ready to put an end to the misery which the thing was sowing.

 

“What if there’s more than one ‘pain giver’?” Cullen always had a more level head for logic than she did, but Audrie looked to the werewolves for an answer.

 

“Only one,” a female confirmed, “but it is powerful, Warden. It has magic. Terrible magic. Dark. Sometime taken from our blood.”

 

“Is it an Abomination? Darkspawn? Something else?” Audrie didn’t think the werewolf would have an answer. A lot of them were born in the forest from lupine parents and hadn’t ever been out in the world. 

 

“A Keeper gone … wrong.” 

 

_Or one of them might be a former Dalish with some memories. What do I know about being turned into a werewolf?_

 

The one who Audrie had given water groped back to the time before the bite and pack. It was difficult to recall anything underneath the rage and wolf instincts, but there had been magic. He remembered a little, almost like dreams, if he tried very hard. “It is very old, I think, kept alive somehow with a deal made with the demon inside the table it uses. The Pain Giver may be something from the Beyond, too. I wasn’t a Keeper.” At least he didn’t think he was. “I can only tell that the table needs blood.”

 

“Nothing ever good comes from blood magic,” Alistair growled, and Cullen agreed with a savage nod of his head. He still heard the echoing screams of people in Kirkwall as demons were spat out of the earth beneath their feet. Blood magic, corrupt mages, templars who had stopped doing their duty. Would he ever really be free of it? He supposed not, but if he was allowed to join the Wardens, his duties would shift. Giving up the pursuit of apostates, maleficar, demons were part of the sacrifice of trading the sword of mercy on his chest for a griffon. He’d given it consideration before he went to Audrie, but seeing evil first hand again made him wonder if he was doing the right thing. There were still templars who believed in protecting the mages, but would he be allowed to do it? Or would he find himself slowly sinking into the quagmire of Chantry politics. That couldn’t be the will of the Maker, but Cullen put his worries aside for the more immediate problem. 

 

“It creates things.” A deep, rattling cough made another she wolf spit out blood through long, needle teeth which didn’t belong in her gums. Audrie tentatively guessed they came from a Deepstalker, and tried to mask her antipathy. “Things which used to be us but are mad with pain and,” she rubbed her muzzle, “mixed. It took my cub out of me,” she added wretchedly. After a short pause, she combed the fur back from her belly, and showed an awkward seal of flesh to flesh. It wasn’t a scar, but something cruder and more invasive. “The cub wasn’t ready for birthing. The pain giver made... something... which didn’t live. Others things don’t die, and do its bidding.”

 

All three humans whistled soft, bitter oaths under their breaths with varying degrees of severity. Audrie was the most affected, and her eyes slitted down to green fury as her hand passed across her eternally empty womb. “So it might not be alone.” The Commander of the Grey told the pair of men grimly. “We’ve fought groups before. Cullen, if you can get close to it, Smite it. Alistair will do the same.” Cullen gave them both a sharp look but Audrie quelled it. “That can be explained later. Right now all you need to know is that the two of you can work in conjunction with templar abilities. I’m going to hold back as much as I can and try not to get shredded, pounded or maimed.”

 

“Protect the mage,” Alistair chimed in helpfully, “she hates it when I say this, but she’s delicate.”

 

Grabbing her staff in both hands, Audrie dusted her palm across the twin dragons which faced each other over a pulsing orb. “Don’t make me explode an abomination on you.”

 

“You see how she is right before a battle,” Alistair told Cullen casually as if they had known one another for years. “So cranky.”

 

“I love you, too,” Audrie told him dryly. “Now come on, I’m already dreading ... well,” she stared at the mad, razor focus coming from the mockery of a griffon. “Let’s just get it over with.”

 

“We could fight with you,” one of the healthier of the cursed offered, looping a clawed hand through the bars and poking his muzzle out. Teeth bared, he shoved futilely against the bars, digging hind claws into the filth which coated the bottom of the cage. “Let us have our revenge for what’s been done to us and for our pack!”

 

“I’d love to,” Audrie muttered. She glared mutinously at the two men, daring them to say a word, “But I left the people who could pick the locks at home.” She almost always traveled with a rogue. Zevran and Leliana had been with them during the Blight, then Sigrun or Nathaniel filled their empty places within the actual Warden Order. She should have thought of it before she left, but it was too late.

 

Alistair knew from long experience when to amuse her and when to be helpful in a different way, so he looked at the cages. “Couldn’t we break the bars or locks? They look pretty old, and if you froze them hard enough or used some spell on the locks, they might break.”

 

“Which would take time,” Cullen pointed out neutrally, “cost her energy, and draw attention. We may have done that already.” He winced as the griffon screeched again, throwing itself against the bars in a frenzied, vain attempt to stab them with a beak as long as a human forearm. 

 

She should have just had Sigrun join them, and the dwarf was sure to be sorry she missed the griffon, even a Blighted one. If only there was some way of curing it. _Then what_ , she mentally argued? It was the only one of its kind. Even if it wasn’t, the Wardens knew better than anyone that there was no going back once a creature became a ghoul. “We’ll get you werewolves out out as soon as we can,” she decided, and hoped she wasn’t making a gamble to get Cullen killed. She and Alistair weren’t indestructible either, but her blood sang with his proximity. It was easy to work with him, and they’d come through worse scrapes. As long as they weren’t too arrogant, she was confident they’d at least live through the battle in one piece. Cullen didn’t have Warden resilience, but neither had half the people who helped them end the Blight. She had to trust him. It was never easy with friends, knowing they were about to get hurt or killed. “Let’s do this.” 

 

Alistair lifted his shield and grabbed Cullen by the pauldron to drag him behind it. They both crouched for as much coverage as possible, turning their faces away. Audrie took her place right behind the two of them and cast the walking bomb spell. “I wish I had a better one,” she sighed as she cowered down behind the pair of armored men and waited for it to incubate. “I hope it doesn’t suffer.” Fire or ice would have been slower and much more painful. She felt she owed the creature something because it had once been the companion to a Grey Warden when it was healthy and whole. They had been a brother or sister, riddled with taint and keeping a sacred duty no different than herself. 

 

The familiar hiss like sizzling meat in a pan bubbled then the griffon gave a flurry of enraged squawks. After the blink of an eye it ruptured from the inside and exploded, sending gobbets of blood and rancid innards raining down on three humans. Bone fragments pelted against Alistair’s metal shield and the men’s armor before the last griffon in existence slid from walls and breastplate. It left the Commander with a sense of both foreboding melancholy, and she collected four feathers which weren’t slathered in ichor. Carefully, she stored them in her belt pouch, and it felt right to keep them. They would molder away in time, but she wanted to hold on to some part of the griffon as long as she could. Saying goodbye was never something she was any good at doing, and she was unapologetically resistant to change.

 

They’d extricated themselves out of the defensive clump when the lock on the door clicked. Cullen positioned himself across from Alistair, and they waited with battle taut muscles. The doorway didn’t fly open, and nothing came leaping out of it in a fit of rage. It swung open slowly with a whisper of a groan, and a tall, whip thin creature with a face like melted black wax blinked oversized eyes at them. The slit of a mouth worked out words in a curious, gurgling, fluting wheeze. “What have you done? What have you done?” The accent on the words was so thick that it was almost impossible for Audrie to make them out. For half a heartbeat, all she could do was stare at it. The monster was as strange as it was unidentifiable. “You have killed it! Taken! Taken!” The voice rose in such agitation that it reached the sound of a knife blade being scraped across a sheet of glass. “Taken from me! No! No-no-no-no-no! Must have it all. All! All of them. Must preserve!”

 

None of them knew for certain what kind of a demon they were against. Greed? It was the only one which fit Cullen’s wide reading and experience, even in Kirkwall. They decided later it was most likely one of the desire group. 

 

“Come pets. Come. Master of Pain commands you. Come!” A ropey thin arm ending in gnarled claws gestured toward the three humans. “If one is destroyed, another must be made. Always. There always has to be a full collection. Yes. Take them pets. Take,” it crooned. “Keep.” The stained rags around its withered body flapped as it shambled toward them like an overgrown spider. It went back to ear puncturing shrieks. “Keep!”

 

“I hate Abominations.” Audrie was more resigned than irritated, but there wasn’t any fear in her voice. Cullen almost smiled at the memory of stumbling over his own words to tell her how brave he’d always heard that she was after her Harrowing. She was going to need the courage, because something which looked as if it slithered out of the Void came out of the door behind the “Collector.” Popping shovel jaws full of jagged teeth might have been part boar at one time, they had the body something faintly resembling a bronto. Globular yellow eyes rolled at them and front limbs made long, snatching fingers. Spikes and hair were patched over their hides. Taint rolled off of them in waves, and to the cacophony of howls from captive werewolves, Cullen and Alistair began to fight their way through them.

 

Cullen hadn’t been near Audrie’s magic in many years, but it had a familiar feeling as it burst around him. Arcane power hit the creatures, and threw a sheaf of ice into the Abomination. The Warden Constable braced his weight back on one heel, and rammed the flat face of his shield into one of the creations, scattering bloodied teeth. It madly scrabbled talons across the flat, protective face of the metal. “They’re stronger than they look!” he yelled in warning. 

 

Cullen found himself backing up, pushing Audrie and Alistair with him as he parried slapping, picking fingers which aimed for his eyes or exposed face. Until they got close, he also hadn’t appreciated how agile they were. Practiced swipes of his two handed weapon were painfully slow as it ducked around him, biting and plucking. Claws penetrated between his armored plates, gouging out long, bloody furrows in his skin. 

 

“They’re trying to get us down with weight,” Alistair panted as he drew blood. He missed the heart of the creature, giving it a glancing wound across the knotted muscle encasing its ribs. “If they do that, they’ll tear us apart!” He’d seen werewolves, particularly the Blight infected ones, use that tactic in the Black Marsh.

 

Jerking his face to one side, the templar almost lost an eye and his face stung with fresh blood where a gash opened up. From experience he knew it would make him blind on one side if he didn’t finish the fight quickly. His clumsy counterattack ricocheted off the bars of one of the cages, sending painful reverberations up through his arms. Another of Audrie’s spells slammed around the Abomination, locking him into an invisible prison which was crushing bones into pulp. She added a more potent form of the Walking Bomb spell and shouted for them. Desperation turned into a riot of pain as the minion slammed Cullen against one of the cages with enough force to drive the wind out of him. 

 

A hairy arm flashed out in the spaces between the bars and dug into the spindly arm sinew of the abomination’s pet. One of the werewolves clamped down its jaws and began savagely shaking its head back and forth like a dog killing a rat. Howls and something which could have screeched from the blackest pits of the Void itself punctured Alistair’s ears, but he took advantage of the werewolf’s help and rammed his sword through the monster’s midsection. Jerking up, the enchanted dragonbone blade which had once belonged to King Maric cut through pliant organs and sliced through bone. Talons ripped opened the Warden’s neck and it gurgled on its own blood for a precious second. In the fading light of its eyes, Alistair could read it’s intent of taking him with it to its death. Healing magic poured over him with the faint taste of blackberries and pine. Audrie’s talents sealed the wound before it could do worse than weaken his knees while he rocked backward. 

 

“Watch it!” Audrie yelled as she got a clear shot at the Collector itself. The stench of blistered stone and fire still coated her nostrils from the first fireball she’d hurled. It had distracted the abomination, and she was savagely determined to finish the battle before anyone else was hurt. “Take cover!” Any other pets left standing were going to have to face a more vicious version of her most lethal and terrible spell, spreading walking bomb to other targets.

 

The abomination screamed a high pitch like wounded rats as Alistair dove between the creature and the Grey Warden’s two allies. Hefting his shield again, he gave them limited protected them from bone fragments exploding out of the collector. Jumping to what was left of the creature Cullen fought, it thrummed wetly before jerking from a similar explosion. Alistair pivoted his waist to give them cover from the opposite angle. Wincing, he couldn’t completely protect Audrie from a number of shards embedding in her scalp, and back of the neck. For a moment, they all lay sprawled or crouched on one knee as they took inventory of injuries. “Ow,” Audrie summarized. “Give me a few minutes to catch my breath if you can. Anyone bleeding badly?”

 

Cullen had jagged pink places all down his sword arm where his armor had been yanked off and skin shredded. Straps were snagged and torn open, exposing flesh and what must have been opened arteries before the healing spell. “I’m fine. You got my wounds.”

 

“All I have left are a few scratches.” Alistair supported Audrie as she peeled herself up, battling exhaustion from pouring her mana into spells. He kept an arm under her shoulders her for a few seconds as she rocked precariously on her feet. “Are you alright?” he asked her anxiously.

 

“I’m fine. Tired, but I’ve still got a spell or two in me if we need them. See if you can get the stuff out of my neck and I’ll put a poultice on it. I’ll be fine.” She lifted her hair for him to give her some hasty healer’s treatment, and rubbed some salve on the wounds. “Let’s make sure nothing else is going to come at us.” Marshaling herself because she was always the one who lead, even when she would have chose not to, she lit their weapons again for light.

 

“Maker preserve us,” she choked as they went down the last flight of stairs. Cullen had seen the Tower turned into something unrecognizable and witnessed tortures which would haunt his nightmares until death. Audrie and Alistair had both crawled through the Dead Trenches and through pits full of things which would make a grown man cringe and weep in terror. There hadn’t been much which turned her stomach so badly as what was sprawled out in front of her. Avernus or the Architect might have come close, but the suffering in the room left an almost physical residue. 

 

Cages hung as thick as dead trees in a forest, and the moaning through them wasn’t the wind. Inside were dozens of experiments, most of them originally elven, human, werewolf, or animals. Nothing was completely recognizable, and the majority were reduced to rotting husks in the bottom of the confinements. In the center of it all was a table crusted with decades of dried blood, pulsing faintly with archaic Tevinter runes. “I don’t even want to get close to that thing,” Audrie muttered as she cautiously hedged toward it. 

 

“We have to do something,” Alistair insisted, looking to her for advice. “Destroy it. I don’t know. We can’t just leave it or what’s left of these creatures here.”

 

“No,” she agreed wearily. “We’ll have to do something.” She doubted the experiments were fit enough to be saved, but they could try. Anything which was too far gone would need a mercy killing, and she hated the thought of it. She cocked her head to one side, abruptly distracted. “I can hear the table whispering.” 

 

“Don’t listen!” Cullen blurted, alarmed, and grabbed her arm with the hand which wasn’t occupied with his sword hilt.

 

Audrie’s first reaction was to lash out, but she fought it into calm complacency. He was protecting her, exactly the same way he would have a decade ago when she was an apprentice. “Cullen,” she soothed, “it’s alright. I said I could hear it, not that I was going to listen. There’s a demon in that thing, and it’s powerful. Of course it would try and get me if it could. I imagine it would love to get out of that table, but I’m not dumb.” She put her hand over his gauntlet, gently prying his fingers loose. “It’s alright,” she repeated gently.

 

Stiffening, Cullen realized his error and nodded. “I’m sorry, Warden Commander,” he apologized formally. She was the Hero of Ferelden, now, and not the young woman he was assigned to watch. She would never be that again.

 

“Cullen, will you please relax? Let’s see if we can do something with this thing.” Try though the three of them might, however, neither blade or magic was able to put more than a few chips into it. For nearly three quarters of an hour they stared stupidly at it and exchanged feeble ideas. 

 

“The repository?” Cullen finally suggested. “There’s other dangerous artifacts there.”

 

“With all that’s happening with the templars, mages and Chantry?” Audrie countered, “I don’t know.” Worn as the exposed stones of Ostagar, she sighed. “Maybe the templars will have a better idea of how to destroy it.” She wondered if Greagoir was going to be more upset with her for handing it over to him or less. “This foul thing has caused too much death and suffering. I can feel how thin the Veil is here, and other demons have to be lurking right on the other side, feeding on the terrible crimes done in this place. Both of these floors need to be scoured and purged if we can. The werewolves who are still able to walk will probably help us. As heavy as the table is, we’ll never be able to move it with just the three of us, anyway.”

 

“You’re assuming we _can_ get them out.” 

 

Audrie looked at Alistair and laughed weakly. “We’ll find a way. We always do. Come on, you two, let’s go free some ‘monsters.’”


End file.
